https://secure.google.maps/

Google Maps just got more secure.  We've introduced a new feature for Google Maps API Premier, allowing our enterprise customers to access Google Maps API Premier securely over https.  This means all communications between the customer's website and the Google Maps servers are sent securely, and offers a better experience to people looking at the maps on secure web pages.

Previously, when a Google Map was embedded in an encrypted web page, users would get a pop-up message saying the page included both secure and non-secure content.  No one likes pop-up messages and the extra clicks they require.  We heard from several companies using Google Maps API Premier on secure pages who wanted to improve the user experience.   We value the product input we get from our customers and we're pleased to be able to accommodate this request.

Several companies have already started using the secure Google Maps API Premier.  For example, Thomson Reuters has started to implement secure Google Maps as part of their Healthcare website.  Other uses include ATM or branch locators for banking websites and secure websites with sensitive customer data.

This new feature is only available with Google Maps API Premier.  So, if you want to put fast, user-friendly maps on your secure website, contact us.  If you're already experiencing the benefits of Google Maps API Premier and want to start using this feature, please contact customer support.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Technical Solutions Engineer, Google Maps API Premier

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The Google Bus goes "App to School"

In July, we announced a milestone of 1 million active users on Google Apps for Education and our plans for the first-ever "App to School" cross-country road trip. Today, we hit the road in the Google Bus to visit 10 universities across the U.S.


To kick the trip off, we're announcing we've reached 2 million active users, and 17 new customers to add to the thousands of universities already on Google Apps. To make it really interesting, we also made Video for Google Apps available for educational institutions.

New customers include:

• Austin Community College
• Clark College
• Clovis Community College
• Delaware County Community College
• Illinois Central College
• Lewis Clark State College
• Maine Township High School District 207
• Oberlin College
• Old Dominion University
• Ottawa University
• Pierce College District
• Saint Ignatius High School
• San Mateo County Community College District
• Southeastern Community College
• St. Olaf College
• Universidad Cesar Vallejo Lima Norte
• University of Alaska

For the entire month of September, the bio-diesel fueled bus (see photo) will be visiting campuses to give students, professors and faculty a chance to play with our latest technology, talk with Google product experts and share how they're using Google Apps with our team.

We will post some of our stories from the road, so be sure to follow us across the country and visit us on our new student blog.

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager, Google Apps

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Using Google Apps in the workplace

Thanks to you, Google Apps has grown in numbers of users and diversity of products.  We're encouraged by the stories you've sent us on how you're using Google Apps to change the way you do business, save money for your company and improve service to your internal customers.  We're often asked to share ideas on how customers can use Google Apps to do things that they couldn't do before and so, we're kicking off a webinar series focused on Google Explorers such as yourself.  We'll shine the spotlight on IT evangelists, business owners and productivity gurus who have employed the suite of Google Apps - (which includes Sites, Video, Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail and Start Page) - to more broadly share information, organize projects and collaborate and communicate more effectively.  We'll also cover other topics from time to time, which we hope you'll find informative, such as demonstrating new functionality, hearing from industry experts and sharing tips on best practices.

Please join us at the following three events this month:

Run your business on Internet time! Lily Sarafan, COO of Home Care Assistance, discusses how her company has used Google Apps to grow nationally in a few short years on Thursday, September 18, 10AM PDT.  Learn how Google Apps and AdWords have helped boost profitability at this national staffing franchisor. Register here.

Use Google Apps to achieve rapid time-to-market. Three internal teams at Google delve into how they used Sites and other Google Apps to rapidly launch a new product on Tuesday, September 16, 11AM PDT.  Find out how Google product teams are able to release early and often.  Register here.

Introducing Google Video for business.  Get a demo of Google Video, the latest addition to Google Apps Premier Edition, on Tuesday, September 9, 11AM PDT.  Google Video provides secure, private video sharing for organizations.  Learn how other organizations are using Google Video and get your privacy, security and deployment questions answered.  Register here.

If you can't make it for the live presentation, you can find recordings of them on our Google Apps channel on Youtube. Also be sure to check out our Google Calendar gadget where we'll announce new webinars and other Google events.  And, always let us know if there are topics you'd like to see us cover.  Thanks!

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Introducing Google Video for business

People have been discussing the promise of corporate video for years. But to date it hasn't met expectations. Doing it well meant investing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized video hardware and software that are difficult to set up, maintain and use. It was out of reach to all but the largest companies, and even for them, justifying the ROI of an enterprise video deployment was a challenge.

Thanks to cloud computing these barriers are now surmountable. Today we're announcing Google Video for business, the latest addition to the Google Apps collaboration suite for Premier Edition customers. Now you can share videos securely and affordably within your organization. There's no need to deploy new hardware or software: your videos are securely stored, processed and managed in Google's powerful, distributed cloud computing infrastructure.

Video for business enables your users to upload and share videos with a few easy steps. Once your videos are uploaded, using them across Google Apps is a breeze. You can share your videos with the entire domain, or with specific users. Video sharing is not just about distributing official corporate videos to the whole organization. It's also about enabling your employees to use video easily as an effective medium for communication and collaboration. Create engaging training portals or team spaces using Google Sites with video embeds, or bring a complex financial spreadsheet to life with a video highlighting the key achievements for the quarter. As an admin, you have owner-level access to all the videos in your domain, which means you can monitor your domain for inappropriate content and remove videos where necessary. Admins can also track how much video storage the domain has used, and who the top uploaders are.

Here's how we're using video inside Google:



Learn how customers are using Google Video for business:



Video is another example of how cloud computing enables entire new ways of communication and collaboration. We believe that Video for business will transform the way you and your organization use video the same way that YouTube has transformed the consumer video space.

You can learn more about video sharing and other innovative collaboration apps for businesses at www.google.com/apps/collaboration.

Posted by Kuan Yong, Product Manager, and Nick Dower, Tech Lead for Google Video for business team

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Security Spotlight: July Virus Attacks

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Apps Security & Compliance Team

In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware. Our zero-hour virus protection technology first started catching these emails on July 20.



Many of the viruses we see follow a similar format, in which an email with an embedded website link in the message is changed from what the link displays. Another recent example was a spoofed CNN newsletter sent out by spammers. In this case, the content included current news stories with numerous links in the message. The majority of the links were valid, but there were some that were replaced with malicious links. As soon as our technology started detecting these messages, we implemented a filter to stop these elusive viruses and voila! -- all of our 14 million business users were protected. This network effect and rapid protection against these new tactics is why businesses are increasingly moving their email security into the cloud.

Viruses tend to increase during the summer months, and August is already showing some new types of viruses. On August 5, we saw a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn't follow trends for long.

These examples are also a good reminder about the importance of educating our colleagues, friends, and family on how to safely interact with email -- namely, that we should all be careful about clicking on links in emails, even if those messages appear to be from people or organizations we know.

Join Google security experts for an upcoming webinar for IT professionals that will explore the topic "How spam is changing your business email, and what to do about it" on Friday, August 15, at 10:00 am PDT.

For more information on how Google can help your business secure its email and web traffic, visit us at www.google.com/a/security.

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Google Maps API: Don't take our word for it

We keep seeing Google Maps popping up in new places, helping businesses provide a more interactive experience to help their customers find what they're looking for, whether it's a store location, a property, a destination, or even a friend.

But don't take our word for it. Listen to our customers themselves. With more than 150,000 websites using the Google Maps API, we hear new stories every day about how they're putting Google Maps to work.

Like this video from the New York Times, which developed 1,600 maps for their website in just 3 days with Google Maps API Premier. Today, over 50% of the pages in the New York Times travel section feature a Google Map.



Those of you in the market for contemporary home design may have seen Crate & Barrel using Google Maps API Premier to provide all-new interactive store locators for stores across the US, as well as its new brand, CB2. The company plans to open its first store in Canada next month, and they're bringing Google Maps along to help Canadian shoppers locate the new stores.

One of the world's largest providers of online real estate listings, Real Estate Australia, has seen a substantial lift in the volume and quality of customers since introducing the Google Maps API to its property search. Also in Australia, an innovative service from Mapmates helps people locate their friends and colleagues in real-time using the GPS capabilities of their mobile phone. Mapmates is taking advantage of the continuous innovation our customers get with the Google Maps API. They have already embedded Google StreetView for cities around Australia, released just last week.

You might say that Google Maps is spreading like wildfire -- which brings to mind another interesting story about San Diego radio station KPBS using Google Maps to keep citizens informed about the spread of wildfires last October.

Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager

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Information avalanche - keep it coming

It's 8:00 am Wednesday morning in Mountain View, California, and I'm already swamped. And if you're currently engaged in any business activity within the reach of this post, it's likely that your plate of assignments, projects, to-do lists, and the number and variety of data you'll need to complete them ahead of time and under budget, is also overflowing.

According to most estimates, the amount of information employees will have to navigate with -- file shares, databases, document systems -- isn't going to shrink any time soon.* That's why today, in addition to going through our inboxes we're announcing a new Google Search Appliance that can index 10 million documents in a single box.

We're hoping this will be a great help to IT departments burdened with typical enterprise search implementations -- many of which require dozens of servers and multiple administrators to search content at this scale. Now organizations will be able to offer their staff secure search across the largest enterprise content sources —Documentum, Filenet, LiveLink, and Sharepoint—all from one easy-to-maintain appliance.

While we can't promise that the avalanche of information will decrease, administrative features with the new appliance, such as the ability to adjust search results for user groups based on department or function, results-biasing based on metadata, (in addition to source, URL, or date), enhanced search analytics, localized interfaces, and the rapid stream of innovation from Enterprise Labs should help employees spend less time searching for information, and more time using what they find to be as productive as possible -- no matter how much is on their to-do list.

*Likely in response to this information explosion, total software revenue for the enterprise search market is forecast to grow to $1.5 billion worldwide by 2012 ("Market Trends: Enterprise Application Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012," Gartner Inc., 2008.)

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer

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