Google Apps for WordPress bloggers

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

First off, congratulations to the WordPress team for recently hitting the one meeeeellllion blog mark. This is a great achievement for WordPress and another milestone for the whole blogosphere.

We were also thrilled to see that WordPress now recommends Google Apps for custom-domain email accounts to bloggers who have their own internet domains. This means that bloggers who use WordPress can send and receive email for free with Google Apps on the same domain where they publish their WordPress blogs.

If you don't happen to be one of WordPress' million bloggers but want fully customized email accounts and much more, Google Apps will work for you too. You can use Google Apps on an existing domain, or register a new domain when you sign up.

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Don't you forget about the Google Mini

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Google Enterprise

The Journal's Dave Nagel just wrote that it's easy "deploy and forget" the Google Mini because of its easy setup and minimal administration requirements. Fortunately, Dave didn't forget to write his very complimentary review of the product.

The review does a thorough job providing background about the Mini and recapping some of the new features in our recent release, such as OneBox integration, secure search, and Google Analytics integration. If you need a search engine for your intranet or public website, make sure to check out the Mini.

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Webinar: Migration and Spreadsheet tools for Google Apps

Posted by Scott McMullan, Enterprise Partner Team

If you haven't stopped by in a while, the Enterprise Solutions Gallery has a bunch of new third party products designed to help you get the most out of Google Apps and your Google Search Appliance. Among the newest entries are gMOVE and gSHARE, two offerings from Google Enterprise Professional partner LimitNone designed to help you build bridges between your existing data and Google Apps.

In fact, if you're interested in moving email, calendar, or contacts to Google or understanding how you can use Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets together, you'll want to attend this week's webinar: Migration and Excel™ tools for Google Apps. It takes place this Thursday May 24th at 11am PST, and you can sign up here.

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Google @ Work Seminars Underway

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Google Enterprise

It's been a few weeks since I wrote about the Google @ Work seminars we're doing throughout the US. Today we kicked off the tour with a successful event at the St. Francis Westin in SF. Michael Lock, our Enterprise Sales Director, spoke to the crowd of more than 200 about Google's role in the consumerization of enterprise technology. We'll be visiting 12 more cities over the next few weeks, so if you haven't already, make sure to sign up at a location near you.

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More Love for the Google Mini

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

Google Apps has been getting a lot of love from the press lately, but search was our first Enterprise product line and remains key to our business. Fittingly, "The 360" tech blog published a great interview with Justia's Tim Stanley on the Google Mini. Of course we love the Mini and it's great to hear a customer say: "Purchasing the Google Mini was a no brainer."

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Mashup Salesforce and Google Apps

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

Its spring and conference season is in full swing!

Salesforce is holding a free developer conference in Santa Clara, CA on 5/21 where they'll have a host of sessions covering various aspects of their Apex platform. As part of this Google will be presenting a session specifically on the synergies between the Salesforce development platform and that of Google Apps. Salesforce has long been a thought leader in on-demand application development and delivery. Their platform is comprehensive and flexible and should feel familiar to those of you working with Google's GData APIs.

We'll look at some specifics around mashing up Salesforce's Customer Relationship Management solutions with the Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets APIs. It should be a great opportunity to learn about the Apex platform as well as make contact with their growing network of ISVs while at the same time learning how you can leverage your knowledge of Google's APIs to build compelling business mashups. Register today and we'll see you there!

Of course don't forget that Google's own Developer Day is also right around the corner on 5/31. With lots to offer for developers of varying interests and abilities, this is gearing up to be a very exciting event that you don't want to miss!

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Un-convention-al

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager

Some of us on the Enterprise product team spent yesterday at StartUp Camp, an unconference focused on helping the start-up community work through the challenges that arise with getting a business off the ground (something I wish I had had before starting my last company).

The idea of the unconference, based on the Open Space methodology, is to have the attendees drive the agenda, with people interested in the same topics splitting off to different break-out rooms. Imagine the entire day as an extended coffee break at a traditional conference, which for me is usually when I learn the most from my fellow conference goers. All around the conference were reminders of the Open Space principles, including the "Law of 2 Feet," which states that, "If you're not learning or contributing it is your responsibility to respectfully use your two feet & find some place you are." Overall, it was a very refreshing conference format and I could see incorporating some unconference time into a more traditional conference format.

Probably the highlight of the day was "speed geeking," where about 25 start-ups presented their elevator pitches and got feedback/grilled by conference attendees. There were a ton of interesting business models being pitched and I'm happy to report that state of the start-up culture is strong. Thanks to David Berlind, Doug Gold and Sun for organizing the event.

Below are some pics from the event, including some of the attendee-generated topics we discussed.

StartUp Camp 2

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GEP connected (Notes from our first European Enterprise partner event)

Posted by Engin Yilmaz, Marketing Manager

Last week, we had our first Google Enterprise Professional (GEP) partner event in Madrid - two days of sharing sales, product and technical knowledge with our partners across Europe. Cisco and CapGemini also presented their insights on Web and Enterprise 2.0, reinforcing our consumerization of IT theme. And during our customer keynote from Vodafone, Dr. Petros Panagiotidis presented data showing that the Google Search Appliance has saved Vodafone a staggering twenty two man years of work!

We also presented our first Enterprise partner awards to:

• Mediasurface – "Best ECM Partner" in recognition of embedding the Google Search Appliance in their Morello content management system.
• Smartlogik – "Innovative Product Integration" for their Onebox implementation of taxonomy integration.
• Sword – "New Business Achievement" acknowledging their work developing connectors for various content management systems.
• Scube – "Best Enterprise Mashups" for their multi-discipline approach to customers with Search, Maps and Apps.
• Byte – "Best Newcomer" for unsurpassed levels of customer care in their work with Vodafone and their overall performance during the last five months.

We'll be posting video from the event on YouTube in the next few weeks.

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VW Website Updates

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land pointed out that the VW of America site that I previously blogged about was including site keywords in an invisible div layer on site pages, which is not in keeping with Google site quality guidelines. I reached out to the technical director of VW's creative agency and found out that they were including the keywords in this manner to increase the amount of content crawled by the Google Search Appliance for the Flash-based pages of the site. Once alerted to this, VW switched to including relevant keywords in the META data of the web pages on the site, an approach that is in keeping with Google quality guidelines. Thanks to Barry for pointing this out and to VW for being so responsive to the issue.

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Search in the driver's seat

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager

Recently Volkswagen of America completely redesigned their website www.vw.com, literally making the search box the center of the homepage. The site search is powered by a Google Search Appliance and they've done a lot of cool UI development so that you can see the most frequently searched for terms as well as search results in an expanding drop down window, without leaving the homepage of the site. Besides being a slick design, putting me in control of the site made me think that VW probably applied the same user-centric approach to designing their cars and made the site feel less marketing-y and more education focused. Take the site for a spin.

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