Google Apps

While the deal between Google and General Motors is still unpublic, Google has officially signed another large Google Apps customer - the largest Spanish banking group BBVA. BBVA plans to implement Google Apps for 110 thousand employees in 26 countries up to the end of 2012. Thus, Google has updated its personal SaaS record (in terms of project volume). It's interesting that BBVA moves to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange (so Office 365 loses again). Besides, this deal will be a huge step forward for Google and for the whole SaaS industry because it's the largest SaaS project in the banking sector. After all, we all know how carefully banks  protect their commercial data. See also the Top 5 largest SaaS projects.

According to the latest insider information, GM is already about to move from their current collaboration system Lotus Notes to Google Apps. It's about 100 thousand seats. At first this information appeared earlier this month - when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and General Motors signed a preliminary agreement according to which GM will test Google Apps and Google has to meet some additional requirements. But GM haven't made the official statement yet. If all goes well, then Google will update its personal record on the SaaS project size. So far, the largest Google Apps customer is Valeo - 30 thousand users. And of course, it's a big victory for the SaaS market. But it's not clear yet what additional requirements GM presented to Google. Won't Google transform the service in favor of big business and make it less usable for small business?

One advantage of Google's main advantages over Facebook is that the search giant can perfectly integrate businesses and individual users (clients) in the single network (Google +). And if it succeed, Google+ will become the successful platform for advertising, unlike Facebook, which hasn't achieved the significant progress in the advertising incomes yet. The first big step in this direction has been done by Google today: from now Google Apps Now users can log in to Google+ under their corporate accounts and use Google+ for business needs. First, Google+ can serve as a social layer via creation of business/project groups (circles) with employee profiles. Second, it can be used as an intranet microblogging system for discussions and file sharing (like Chatter, Yammer ...). Third, it allows to search and support customers via Google+. But of course, the killer Google+ for business is its video chat app Google Hangouts.

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.

During the last 2 weeks Google has almost made another revolution on the Web. No one expected that in the near future someone will be able to break the social monopoly of Facebook, but it looks like Google will succeed at this time. And because today in order to be successful, any business should be a part of the Social Web, then, want-or-not you have to sort out how to use Google+. Fortunately, there is still enough time, because the network is now working in a half-closed mode (registration is by invitation only). Additionally, the key business features will appear only in the second half of the year. But meanwhile you can get used to them:

It wasn't so easy to create a list of the largest SaaS projects. Because though SaaS vendors would like to promote themselves, they often have no clearance from customer to go public on their deployments. Sometimes, when a dispute on the largest projects starts, they claim that they have a customer with XXX users, but don't tell what customer and provide no proof. Therefore, our rating is based on unverified information. However, it is interesting that neither Salesforce nor Google Apps are included in it. And four out of five deployments - are talent management (or human capital - HRM) systems:

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.

Starting from May 10 all companies registering free Google Apps accounts will be able to create only 10 users (instead of 50 users as before). For existing accounts the limit won't be reduced. So if you always wanted to start using Google Apps for your business, but never had enough time to start - now it's time to sit down and register an account for your company. It's interesting that Google has decided to implement such a significant reduction of the free limit immediately after the launch of Microsoft Office 365 - perhaps its main competitor. Apparently, the guys at Google have no fear at all. The paid version of Google Apps also has something new - the flexible billing option. Now companies can pay for Google Apps on a monthly basis ($5 / user per month) instead of payment for one year ($50 / user per year).

One of the SaaS advantages over in-house apps is that SaaS applications are updated by providers on their own and users don't have to bother about how to install patches or new versions. But such scheme has also an obvious drawback - update occurs when the provider decides, but not when the user wants. And if the user doesn't read provider's blog and ignores his emails with update announcements, these updates can happen very unexpectedly and disrupt the normal functioning of the company. Most SaaS providers that serve large companies (like Salesforce), prefer to do only 3-4 (major) updates per year. They call these update "new versions", announce them long before the release and make a show for their presentation. Another story with Google Apps which silently updates almost every week - that is Google's philosophy.

Google announced the Google Apps Certification Program today. What is the certification value? It is recommended that a candidate have a minimum of 3-6 years of professional IT experience, and complete at least 3 Google Apps for Business deployments, have an experience with the use of Google Apps Directory Sync and server side migration tools. But the other thing - is more interesting: the certification exam is conducted via Internet. For this purpose Google uses the special online testing service Kryterion On-Line Proctoring. In addition to online tests, video and web conferencing tools, this service also provides trained proctors, that detect any unusual behavior from test takers: all unusual eye movements, removing oneself from the field of vision and making atypical noises are all noted and a behavior alert is sent to the test taker. To participate in the exam a candidate need to buy a special webcam recommended Kryterion. The exam costs $100 and is currently available only in English. Other languages will appear later.

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.

Google Apps Marketplace - online marketplace for Google Apps add-ons - was opened on March. During 10 first months it has collected 250 applications used by about 4 million users. Recall that to add your own application to Google Apps Marketplace, you need to link Google-authorization, pay $100 and pass through moderation. According to Google, the most popular Google Apps  add-ons are project management system, CRM systems and accounting services (these are the very tools that are not available in Google Apps by default). Here are the top 10 most popular applications in the SaaS marketplace in 2010:

As promised, Google has added the consumer services (that were previously only available for individual users) to the Google Apps suite. Last week they added Google Voice (for US and Canada users only) and today - allowed to add any of 60 Google services. Account administrator can select which services to add and which - not. Moreover, the administrator can define which users or groups will have access to each service. For example, for marketing staff he can add Adwords (for advertising), Google Analytics (for monitoring site stats), Blogger and YouTube (for corporate blog and video blog), and for IT professionals - Google App Engine (for developing business applications). Also potentially useful for business may be Google Reader (as an enterprise RSS reader) and Picasa (for intranet galleries). The opportunity to add new services is also available in the free version of Google Apps.

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:

Today, Google has significantly improved Google Apps security by implementing two-factor authentication. If an account administrator activates this feature, users after entering Google Apps login / password will need to enter a secret code that will be sent to them via SMS, or generated by mobile application or dictated via phone call. Thus, even if somebody steals your Google login and password - he won't be able to use them without your phone. Such security scheme is used in many online banking and online payment systems. At the moment the new feature is available in Google Apps Premiere Edition. Soon it will appear in free Google Apps accounts, as well as in personal GMail-accounts.

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 announced that it stops further development of its revolutionary collaboration service Google Wave. The official reason - "service has not seen the user adoption we would have liked". Two months ago Google Wave was opened to public and included into Google Apps, but apparently, not too many people gave it a second chance after not successful beta-testing. Google Wave will continue to exist, but in the future it may be closed - i.e. the service will be in the same state, as Google Notebook (although still with new user registration). For those who use the service, Google plans to open source the code of the main modules (so that they could restore the basic functionality on its own servers) and provide tools for migrating data from Google Wave. And now about why this occurred with the service that was supposed to change the world:

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.

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.

Pretty silently (not like when beta testing was started) the revolutionary service Google Wave has been opened to a public and added to the business suite of Google Apps. Interest towards Google Wave has been reducing since the release of this service (about a year ago). The primary reason for this is its complexity compared to the direct competitor - E-mail. Besides Google Wave appeared to be buggy during testing and scared even geeks. However, now Lars Rasmussen, the Wave project manager, argues that Google Wave is ready for high load and performs fast enough. In addition, developers have simplified adding comments and search for new changes in wave. They also have corrected the lack of integration with email - you can now set the email-notifications about changes in waves (although you can't add comments in the opposite direction - from the email).

In response to the recent launch of VMForce, Google today announced the upcoming version of its cloud platform for enterprise users - Google App Engine for Business. Until now, GAE was actually not suitable for hosting enterprise applications. First, GAE does not provides enterprise-ready support, security and service level guarantees. Besides, it supports only one database - Big Table, which is not used in existing business applications, and locks clients into one platform. The enterprise version of GAE, which is scheduled for 4 quarter of 2010, will fix these issues. Corporate customers will be offered a premium support, 99.9% SLA, administration panel for managing security policies. In addition, GAE will add support for SSL and SQL databases. Instead of difficult-to-forecast scheme of payment for computer resources, the clients will pay a flat rate - $8/month for app user.

As you know, Google Apps contains only those applications that are useful for collaboration. And because of this, Google Apps users have a problem with accessing other Google services - they constantly need to switch between accounts. Especially it looks stupid if company is using Blogger for corporate blog, YouTube for corporate video-channel, running ad campaigns in Adwords, hosting corporate galleries in Picasa, or its employees are using Google Reader as an enterprise RSS client. According to the post in the Google Enterprise Blog, this summer most Google services will become available in Google Apps. It remains only to solve the issue with IT administrators that want to control and monitor these new services.

If you develop SaaS service or intend to move the IT infrastructure to the Internet, then, of course, you can buy VPS or dedicated server. But in the era of Cloud Computing that option is obsolete. If you want to have a really reliable, secure and scalable hosting,  to automate most operations and (eventually) save money, it is logical to use one of the cloud platforms. And, depending on your goal, you can select a very interesting solution, which provides far more opportunities superior than conventional hosting. For example, for SaaS developers some platforms provide ready client base. Below - our top ten list of cloud platforms.

Major SaaS vendors are now less interested in providing applications - they want to create web platforms and grab the world (and earn commission on the other developers). Salesforce was the first to play this game, then Google, NetSuite, SugarCRM and others jumped into this wagon. Box.net (that doesn't have such financial strength as the above mentioned companies) invented even more interesting platform strategy. Box.net wants to be present on each popular platform. First, they created the connector for Force.com, then joint the Intuit Partner Program and Google Apps Marketplace, and recently released modules for SuiteCloud and Sugar 6. Thus, they build the cross-platform cloud content management system. This system allows to store all content in a single online repository and access it in different SaaS systems used in the company: CRM, ERP, Collaboration system. Even more interesting is the opportunity to create shared cross-company extranet based on Box.net: for example, the same file may be available from Salesforce account owned by company A and NetSuite account owned by company B.

Recently, Google released the next anti-microsoft tool - Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, the plugin which allows you to easily move mail, calendars and contacts from Exchange to Google Apps. Last year they released the utility that syncs Outlook with Google Apps, but now you can import data directly from the Exchange server. Previously, Microsoft just ignored such events, or commented that Google Apps - is just a toy that no serious company will use. But Google's constant pressure is making them nervous. Microsoft recently launched the channel on Youtube, which contains videos explaining why MS Office products are better than Google's. For example, here's the video Exchange vs GMail:

As expected, Google has launched the online store Google Apps Marketplace, which allows developers to easily access the Google Apps userbase, which counts 25 million users. More than 50 providers already used this opportunity - now the Google Apps users (directly in the control panel) can add Atlassian Jira bug tracker, DimDim web conferencing, Freshbooks online accounting, Box.net intranet, Manymoon project management, SlideRocket presentations, etc. There you can find even such heavyweights as NetSuite and SuccessFactors. We also note the presence of Zoho apps - Google has once again demonstrated its loyalty towards the competitor.

Recently the planet has become a dangerous place. Haiti, Chile, Turkey. Where will be the next earthquake? What will you do if the roof fall on your server (or data center) and all your business data will be lost? Apparently, Google decided to benefit on this situation and published the post that talks about how Google Apps protect business data from disasters. To ensure the security of user data in Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video it's beeing synchronized in real time between the two remote data centers. If suddenly one of these data centers will be destroyed, the data will be immediately replicated to the third data center and so on. This technology is used in the large companies, but, for example, real-time synchronization of 25Gb Mailbox costs them $150-500. And Google offers this service for free, despite the fact that the service is used by 2 million companies with 20 million active users.

As you know, Google Apps has no specialized project management solution, and this is very disappointing, as there are many other useful utilities for online workgroups there. However, there are three tools that can be used to solve this problem. And the first of them is Google Sites. You can use Google Sites to manage one large project, or create a site for each small project in it (there are even some templates for project sites). Since Google Sites is, in fact, a wiki, you can easily work with the project documentation there. In addition, Google Sites allows you to embed group calendar (Google Calendar), task list (Google Tasks) and documents from Google Docs. All these elements are very useful for project management, but of course, task collaboration in this solution - is the weakness.

Today Microsoft has officially opened its cloud platform Windows Azure. It's a cloud for deploying SaaS services and hosting enterprise applications, that provides Microsoft-focused infrastructure and development tools. However, Azure also supports PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Python, Java, Eclipse and Zend. The main Azure advantage over Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud is the high level of automation, allowing developers to focuse on their applications, rather than on the infrastructure. In addition, this platform enables to integrate hosted apps with the local IT infrastructure with the help of SOAP, REST and XML (thus supporting Microsoft's S+S strategy). The cost of using Windows Azure - is lower than the cost of Windows-infrastructure, built on Amazon.

The soap opera about fabled GDrive (Google's online storage service) is finally over. As we expected, Google will not create a separate service. Instead, Google Docs allow now to upload any files and use them for online collaboration. Each account provides 1Gb free of charge. Additional memory can be purchased for $ 0.25/Gb per year. Google Apps users can purchase additional 5GB for $17 per year. Maximum file size is 250 MB. Many file types can be viewed online using Google Viewer (unfortunately, video is not supported). In addition, Google opened the Google Documents List API, which allows third-party applications to synchronize files with Google Docs or use it as an online file storage. There are already 3 useful applications using this API:

Today Google unveiled the long-awaited smart phone Nexus One, and of course we wondered, how this device can affect the mobile Enterprise market. It turned out that compared to the main competitor iPhone, G1 or other Android-smartphones, Nexus One is almost nothing new. Yes, it's designed to work with web-applications - it has the best on the market touch screen (480x800), virtual keyboard, Chrome Lite browser with dynamic scaling, support for Flash, Ajax and Google Gears, but the browser works slower than the iPhone's Safari. Yes, it can access mobile Internet via EDGE, 3G (UMTS / HSUPA), Wi-Fi, but there is nothing unusual. It costs $530, so the price will not be a the reason for business owners to equip their staff with this google phone.

Finally Google has made this simple and logical move - Google Groups have been added to its online suite of business applications. Google Groups allow you to create workspaces for departments or projects that include wiki, discussions and files. And also Google Groups allow you to quickly provide access to the various elements in Google Apps (documents, calendars, videos, sites) to certain group of employees. And when the user is excluded from the group, he loses access to all the associated resources. Groups in Google Apps can be created either by the administrator or users themselves, if the administrator has allowed this. The group owner set up access rules, public access options, invites participants and moderate their actions.

Google opened a new front in the war for business users. At that time Google pushes the idea that companies appreciate openness of business applications, i.e. the possibility to import/export their data to/from these apps. At the same time the leading business software vendors (IBM, Microsoft) use to lock user data and don't provide easy tools to export it in the needed format. The new Google's project Data Liberation Front contains information about how to export data from Google applications. For example it gives guidelines of how to use GMail over POP3 and IMAP protocols, or how to export Google Calendar in ICAL format.

A year ago Google opened Google Solutions Marketplace - online store for third-party applications that can be added to Google Apps account. (Something similar to Salesforce AppExchange). But unlike Salesforce, Google doesn't promote this marketplace. Even, there is no link to applications catalog in the Google Apps control panel. Nevertheless, already about two hundreds different applications have been submitted to the marketplace. They share the Google Apps login and integrate with native apps (like Docs or Calendar) by means of APIs. For example, you can create a project management system and link its internal tasks to documents in Google Docs or contacts in Google Contacts.