GMail

Usually the companies that develop and sell intranet portals, position them as an alternative to the Email. They say that instead of endless mailing back and forth, your users can now work with data in one place. But with Google - it's another story. Google wants companies to use Google+ as a social intranet solution and continue using GMail. So that's why both solutions have been closely integrated. In GMail you now can filter messages by Google+ circles. So, if you create a Google+ circle for a workgroup, you can view all emails related to this workgroup separately. In the right column near the message you now can see the latest post of this contact in Google+. In addition, contacts in GMail will be updated, if your co-worker updates his profile in Google+. Thus, your address book will be always relevant.

As you know, earlier GMail, Google Calendar and Google Docs supported offline mode in all browsers using Google Gears plug-in. But then Google decided to bet on HTML5 and abandoned its own proprietary plug-in. The Gears was quickly removed from the Chrome browser (in Firefox and IE it still works). And today Google developers were happy to announce that the offline mode for these apps in Chrome is back and it is implemented on HTML5. However, for an average user it will look no better than it was before: for offline access you still need to install an app (from the Chrome Web Store). In addition, the interface of the offline app is different from the usual web-based GMail interface. It looks lie GMail for iPad.

What Google needs to do to entice users from Outlook to GMail? For example, make GMail look like Outlook. Now it's possible. You can add the Preview pane to your GMail inbox, placing it in the third vertical column (like at the screenshot) or under the messages list. The feature can be turned on in the GMail Labs. But between the left nav sidebar, the list of messages, the message itself, and then the right sidebar - which includes the new People Widget and ads - there’s a lot going on in the inbox.

VoIP-service in GMail, which was earlier available only in the U.S. and Canada, has appeared in the user accounts in almost all countries of the world - in 38 languages. Here is the list of countries where Gmail Call Phone is NOT currently available: Argentina, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran , Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Viet Nam. With this global intervention, Google has lowered its VoIP rates, making them slightly cheaper than rates of its new main rival - Skype. For example, a call to France costs 8 cents (vs. 16.9 cents in Skype), to USA - 1 (vs. 1.9). As before GMail Call Phone requires quick browser plug-in installation - the same plug-in that is used for video calling in GMail.

Remember how Mark Benioff laughed at Microsoft's anti-advertising campaign? It turns out that Microsoft also can do similar things. A few days ago Google launched the advertising campaign that encourages users to switch from draconian email systems and their “embarrassingly outdated addresses” over to GMail, which features such niceties as free phone calls and video chat. For this campaign the video (see above) was created. You can see the red link to this video in your GMail-account. But Microsoft, whose Hotmail service is obviously one of the targets of Google's campaign, isn’t keeping quiet. Today another video hit the Web:

Google Apps for Business gets a new interesting feature - the read (i.e. open) notification. It works this way: you send a message and if you don't receive the reply for a long time, you can open the message and check whether the recepient has read it or not. The notification can be enabled by Google Apps account admin for all users and works only for internal communications (within the domain). Thus, you can make internal collaboration more strict and possibly more effective. Because employee, that sends an important task via email can control its reception and if necessary can call the recipient and ask to check the mail.

Quite a strange idea - to make a search plug-in for GMail and Google Apps - i.e. the services of the Search Giant. Nevertheless, the startup CloudMagic had enough courage to make it. And they've created really useful thing. Most people would say that the search in GMail - is great enough, and even if this CloudMagic gives search-as-you-type results - it's not the reason to pay attention to it. But the search speed - is not the greatest feature of CloudMagic. First, it shows search results in a popup widget - on top of the main GMail interface. So if you writing an email and need to find some information in the previous messages or docs - you don't need to save the email to drafts, open the search page, then view the search results one by one, copy something and go back to the email. Now you can (without closing the message) quickly find and copy what you need in the popup widget.

During the next two weeks Google will roll out the new feature in GMail - People widget - the sidebar containing the profile the person that sent you the email. This widget will display his photo, short description, his current schedule from Google Calendar, latest emails, shared documents, recent messages from Google Buzz. The widget also provides quick access to contact your contacts through e-mail, chat, a meeting, and so on. If several people are involved in the tread, you'll see a list of them with their online status. As you can see, unlike the popular social plugins (Xobni, Rapportive), which basically pull the public information from other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), the People widget uses only the internal data from Google services. So it's basically intended for collaboration and social interaction in the companies using Google Apps.

As known, Zoho uses to make friends with Google. Despite the fact that both companies are developing online offices for SMB, Zoho always combines its applications with Google Apps, rather than compete with them. Zoho is the champion by the number of applications in the Google Apps Marketplace (i.e. integrated into Google Apps). And maybe that's why Zoho for a long time didn't touch the holy grail of Google Apps - email app GMail. In fact Zoho launched it's email service (Zoho Mail) almost two years ago, but it was just a personal email service. It was as functional as GMail and even allowed to use your own domain, but it had no administrative panel that allows to create accounts and manage security policies. So it couldn't be used as a corporate mail server. Now it can.

On the 1st of April Google kinda joked - introduced the new feature - GMail Motion - the ability to control emails and even enter text in the GMail mailbox using gestures (see video). But some people don't understand jokes. The guys from Southern California University took Kinect, connected it to GMail using the plug-in and turn into reality the technology that Google showed in the promotional video. Here's how it works:

This morning about 150 thousand GMail users were very surprised to see that all their email history disappeared. And while Google is working to restore the data, it's time to think about safety for those who was not affected. Of course, users of the paid Google Apps may not worry, but if you use a free GMail account, it is recommended to create mailbox backups. And do not panic and insist that SaaS applications - are not safe. If you keep all your mail only in the desktop e-mail client, the probability that your computer glitch and lose your data - is usually not less than the probability of data loss by SaaS-provider. So, there are 3 ways to save your GMail on your computer:

Two-factor authentication, which has been available for users of paid Google Apps account since September 2010 is now available in all free GMail and Google Apps accounts. Recall that unlike the usual authorization the two-factor authentication includes the second step - entering the secret code received via SMS or generated by mobile application (for Android, iPhone or BlackBerry). This authentication method is often used in online payment systems and Internet banking services, because it ensures a high level of security. If you are working on one computer you won't enter the code very often because authorization will be done automatically. So you won't feel any inconvenience, but will considerably improve your data security. You can activate the two-factor authentication on this page.

Facebook today has introduced the updated messaging system Facebook Messages, which is also known as "Email killer" or "GMail killer". Given that all Social Web inventions are now rapidly deployed to Enterprise, we are certainly want to find out if it will kill such useful business tools as Email and GMail. At first sight - it's nothing to worry about. Although Facebook Messages can really replace Email in communications between family and friends, but in the Enterprise sphere it will be able to replace Email only in some cases for communication with customers. No one will use Facebook for important business correspondence because of its privacy issues. However, one simple idea of Facebook Messages can change the Email position in the Enterprise too.

Sometimes you send important email-messages. And in this case, it is important for you to know whether the recipient has read the message, and if he hasn't responded - contact him again. You can strain your brain and keep all the important things in your memory. You can use reminders such as Google Calendar, but it's not very convenient. The new plug-in for GMail - EmailOracle - is an ideal solution for such cases. It adds 2 checkboxes to send-email form - "remind me if I haven't heard back in ... days" and "track whether the recipient opens this email". It's not hard to guess what happens after you send the email. Alerts / reminders are sent by email, or you can open the EmailOracle control panel and immediately see the status of all tracked emails. To track the message opening EmailOracle inserts in it a small picture, which works like a common site counter. And with this picture there is a little trick:

Google has created a lot of innovative products, including GMail and Google Apps. Almost all progressive people enjoy and use them. But unfortunately, most office workers who use the paid versions of these applications - can hardly be called progressive. They are doing their job and want that mail and other business applications work in a traditional way and not to change. That is why, we see strange (but logical) things: Google rolls back innovations in order to please this paying majority. For example, GMail. Last year Google resolved the global problem with tags (because this paying majority got used to folders in Outlook). GMail tags began working like folders - with tree view, drag and drop feature. Today GMail adds an option to switch off the threaded view - that is, to remove the most convenient GMail feature. The similar process is taking place in the Google Docs:

It is pleasant that though GMail video chat hasn't become the second Skype and does not bring any revenue to Google, the company still continues its development. Besides, it is personally lead by Christopher Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps. Apparently, the company has big plans for utilizing video chat in business.   And another confirmation for this guess is the latest new feature - improved video quality (it can be turned on in GMail Labs). Now the video chat supports VGA video (640x480), and the picture looks more clear, the CPU is less loaded and internet connection may be lower. According to Vander Mey, it's all thanks to new technology of hardware-accelerated video decoding based on H.264 (and, it is not the result of the GISP acquisition but Google's own development). Note, that if you want to enable video chat in GMail, you need to install this plug-in.

Email was the first collaboration tool in the Intarnet. Then intranet portals emerged, and they wanted to kill Email because of its lacks: instead of sending back and forth messages and documents, they are placed on a portal web-page (for example, in the news, on the forum or file cabinet). But due to the fact that people got used to e-mail and email was also used for external communications - intranet portals failed to replace the Email as a primary workspace. Moreover, recently Email launched the counterattack. And it happened because the major enterprise Email-solutions (GMail, Outlook, Lotus Notes) have become the platforms that allow third-party developers to add new functionality.

Attention - is more precious resource than time. And e-mail - is a black hole, which draws your attention. While spending just a few minutes to check your inbox, you can spend a lot of (units) of attention - tire your brain and significantly reduce its efficiency (especially if you use to check your email every half an hour). Until now, GMail users had some advantage in this issue. GMail provides, perhaps the world's best spam filter. Besides, tags, stars, customizable filters, discussion threads help to make the mailbox more clear. But nowadays, when an average office worker receives 110 emails per day - it's not enough. That is why the GMail developers came up with the new revolutionary GMail feature - Priority Inbox .

Few days ago the analytical company Frost & Sullivan stated that Google will soon storm the unified communications market, which is dominated by Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. After all, Google has GMail, Google Voice, GTalk, Buzz, Gizmo5, Android, GISP and it remains just to combine all these technologies into single offering. And Google has decided to immediately confirm this forecast - from today GMail allows you to make and receive phone calls (thanks to the integration with Google Voice and Gizmo5). Meanwhile the VoIP service in GMail is available only in US.

At last Google (aka Search giant) has decided to make the search in Google Apps more convenient. We can't say that until now it was bad, but if you wanted to find an email - you had to open GMail, if you wanted to find a document - you opened Google Docs, etc. Thus, to get a full view about any client or task you had to collect data from various sources. Now GMail has added a new feature called Google Apps Search that allows to the search for documents from Google Docs and pages from Google Sites right inside your inbox (you can activate this feature in the GMail Labs). Unfortunately, this search does not include results from Google Calendar and Google Notebook. Unlike Google, Zoho was more fundamental in online office search. Early this summer it released Zoho Search, which is a separate service (like google.com) that can search in all major Zoho apps. As you can see, Zoho prefers to create new services, and Google is positioning GMail, as the primary user interface for all Google Apps applications.

Today, Google has rolled out the new GMail version and it's major upgrade is the fully redesigned Google Contacts section. Now the main GMail menu consists of 3 main items: Mail, Contacts and Tasks. And while the Tasks module is still like a toy, the Google Contacts has been remaked into a grown-up contact manager with interface, similar to Gmail (which has already proved its usability). You can now assign tags to contacts, like to emails. The contact page now includes the large Notes field that is convenient to log the most important points in relationships with a person. You can also see all email conversations with this person. Besides now you can edit the contact data without switching to the edit mode (like before). But the most interesting - is not the external redesign. It turned out that Google Contacts has its own product manager - Benjamin Grol, and when he represented the new features, he noted that Google is thinking about turning Contacts into a better CRM solution.

As you know, Google services are popular both for business and for personal use. That is why, many users often have a need to switch from working to personal account (for example, to check mail). This required multiple logout/login procedures. But now this process will be much more easier - Google is rolling out multi-account sign-in that allows to switch between accounts using the top menu. You can activate this feature and add accounts on this page. However, switching between accounts will work not for all services - only for GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Sites, Google Voice, App Engine and Google Code. In addition, those who activate multi-account sign-in - would have to to give up the offline features in Gmail and Calendar. Recall that soon another related problem will be solved soon - some personal services (Google Reader, Blogger, Youtube ...) will become available in Google Apps accounts.

Rapportive - is a plug-in for GMail (or more exactly - for browser) which in the GMail's right pane instead of ads shows the social profile of the person who sent you the email. The information for the profile is collected automatically (searched by email-address) from the most popular social networks and public services (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, etc.). Thus, you can see the latest actual information about the person - his photo, contacts, interests, recent messages, current location. You can add personal notes to the profile. It supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari. This plugin can turn GMail in something like a Social CRM - the useful tool for communications with customers. Of course, Rapportive - it's not super innovative service. We already wrote about Xobni, Gist and Outlook Social Connector, which also display social profiles in email clients. However, yesterday Rapportive raised over $1 Million from Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and some other ventures.

Almost a year ago GMail has become a full-fledged email-service for virtual businesses when it enabled users to send messages from GMail through any SMTP server, i.e. from any email-address (for example, now in your personal GMail inbox you can respond to customer emails and the customer will receive your answer from the corporate domain). However, one little issue prevented this feature of becoming usable - you could create only one signature for all email-accounts. And only a year later that issue was resolved. Now, you can create a separate signature for each email-account in GMail. Moreover, now you can format the signature in WYSIWYG-editor, add links and images to it. Sure that this feature will make Internet entrepreneurs happy.

Socialwok (known as the "social layer for Google Apps") like the online organizer Producteev, shows us the new meaning of "cross-platform" definition. Realizing that users most of time spend in email clients (such as Outlook and GMail), Socialwok simply decided to get inside these email clients. Socialwok was one of the first services to use the new GMail API and has created the gadget that can be expanded on the entire GMail workspace (see screenshot) and allows to post messages to microblogs, share Google Docs files, images, Youtube videos and events from Google Calendar, search for Google Docs, post to Twitter or Facebook right from your GMail interface.

In addition to the business version of GAE and cloud storage GS, at the I/O conference Google introduced for developers the new APIs for GMail and Google Buzz. New GMail API allows developers to embed applications directly to emails (as gadgets). These gadgets are currently only available for GMail in Google Apps, and may be added by account administrator from Google Apps Marketplace. For example, Gist and Xobni gadgets display person social information at the bottom of email (as they do it in MS Outlook and Lotus Notes). The Manymoon gadget allows to quickly create a task or project from the email. Taking into account that virtually all enterprise collaborative and social tools use email for notifications, we can expect an avalanche of new GMail gadgets, as well as increasing popularity of this email service in the enterprise segment.

So, iPad is now available in US and like Avatar is breaking all records (already about 400 thousand devices are sold). The first users have already downloaded several millions iPad applications, but most of them are consumer apps, rather than business applications. As we noted earlier, iPad has a little chance to become a revolutionary business tool. And not just because of the lack of webcam, multitasking, Flash support and security measures. Despite its originality, iPad will compete in the corporate market with an army of netbooks and smartphones (including iPhone). But certainly iPad will be useful for business of software vendors, which have already begun to announce iPad clients to get the customer attention.

The same day, when Microsoft released Exchange 2010, its competitor, Cisco, impressed the IT world with numerous product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio. The company unveiled the enhanced unified communication system, three new intranet and social software solutions. But the most significant new product is Cisco WebEx Mail that will compete with MS Exchange. It integrates some of the technology Cisco acquired when it purchased PostPath in 2008 and Webex Mail service. The mail difference from Exchange is that it's the SaaS solution. Users can access their mail and calendar through browser web interface or sync it with their mobile client (Blackberry, iPhone, ActiveSync). As for the desktop client, Cisco Webex Mail is intended to use MS Outlook. The developers boast of the complete integration with Outlook, including email, calendar, notes and shared folders.

When early this year IBM released their new SaaS platform, LotusLive, they promised to add Email to its suite. Today this promise is realized: the brand new SaaS email service LotusLive iNotes is available for business-users. IBM pushes it as a new alternative to Google Apps. Why Google Apps, but not GMail? Because, except the email tools, iNotes contains calendar and contact manager. IBM reps say that Google can't understand the difference between consumer web-services and business apps, and IBM has a vast experience in creating and supporting complex enterprise systems. So, it's just a question of time, when iNotes will drive away Google Apps users, moreover it costs only $36/user/year against Google's $50.