Google Apps News: August 2010 | Table of Contents
| Hello Google Apps administrators! We're back with this month's edition of Google Apps news and updates. We hope you enjoy it and pass on the word to your users. As always, we'd love to know what you would like to see in upcoming newsletters and we welcome you to submit your feedback. To stay on top of announcements, you can get new feature notifications by email or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for reading, The Google Apps Team | | New features in Google Apps Advanced policy management New user policy management features let administrators segment their users into organizational units and control which Google services are enabled or disabled for each group, making it easy to test new applications with a pilot group or turn certain features off entirely for a subset of users. Read more about this in the Help Center. Support for organizations with multiple domains Multi-domain support allows organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from a single control panel. Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email addresses but can also see co-workers from other domains in the organization's global address book. It's also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites, and the rest of Google Apps. Google Apps data migration enhancements We recently made some improvements to this migration tool to make moving to Google Apps even easier. This tool is available to Premier and Education Edition customers. More information on the updated data migration tool is here. IMAP support - Administrators can use the tool's new IMAP capabilities to migrate email from systems like Novell Groupwise to Google Apps, or even migrate data between Google Apps accounts. PST support - Administrators can migrate PST files on behalf of users in their domain once they have aggregated users' data files in one location. Better support for hosted Exchange - Administrators can now migrate data from hosted Exchange by running the migration tool on local servers, without requiring the Exchange hosting partner to run any special software on their end. Horizontal navigation and more in Google Sites We're pleased to have introduced several highly-requested features in Google Sites: horizontal navigation, global footer and a deleted items area. Horizontal navigation enables site owners to easily add links across the top of their sites. Site owners can also add a global footer that displays across all pages on a site, and we added a new section for deleted items in sites, making it easier to get to deleted pages and attachments. Audit API The Audit API enables admins to perform supervision and compliance tasks on email accounts within the organization. With the API, admins can perform tasks such as export mailboxes, monitor inbox activity, and retrieve account login information. The Audit API is available to Premier and Education Edition customers. More Google Applications coming to Google Apps Later this year, Google Apps users will be able to access any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account. This means users will be able to publish with Blogger, share project images with Picasa, track current events in Google Reader and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. Existing Google Apps customers will be moved to the new infrastructure in the fall, though you will be able to make the switch voluntarily soon. More information is available on our Help Center. If you'd like to begin testing this change with your organization, just fill out this form. Google Apps Marketplace This Spring, we announced the release of a new API that allows third party vendors to create contextual gadgets in Gmail. With these new integrations, Google Apps users are able to do more than ever without leaving your email. These applications have the ability to "understand" your needs from the content of your email, and display interactive gadgets to help you be more productive. Whether it's productivity management tools such as Smartsheet and Gist, or customer management solutions such as Solve360, you can get more done than ever right from your inbox! Check out some of these apps and how they work in this blog post and attend our webinar next week for more information. Webinar: Gmail contextual gadgets: Learn how to access Line of Business data from your inbox Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT Register here How are other customers using Google Apps? Learn how Imagination, a marketing and communications company in the UK, is using Google Apps. Since moving to Google Apps, they've improved collaboration across their 9 offices in 15 countries, as well as improving how they schedule their time with clients more efficiently. Watch their story on the Google Apps YouTube Channel. Get the most out of Google Apps: Tips and Tricks for your users! Five things you may not know you can do with attachments: We know that if you're using Google Docs then you're familiar with the ease of no longer having to send attachments back and forth. However, many still use attachments daily, so we've put together a few tips on how to get the most out of Gmail and attachments: 1. Drag attachments in and out In: Simply drag files from your desktop right into the message you're composing and they'll upload from there. (Make sure you're using Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 or Safari 5 for this to work.) Out: Simply drag the icon for a Gmail attachment to your desktop. (Note that dragging attachments out is only supported in Google Chrome for now.) 2. Select multiple attachments Attaching multiple files one by one is no fun. Instead, just multi-select the files you want to attach by holding down the Ctrl key (or Command on a Mac) and clicking on each file you want to attach. Holding down the shift key will select a continuous list of files. 3. Never forget an attachment again Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file (things like "I've attached" or "see attachment") and warns you if it looks like you forgot to do so. Every day, this saves many people the embarrassment of having to send a follow up email with the file actually attached. 4. View attachments online When you receive an attachment, sometimes you just want to view it and there's no need to download or save it to your desktop. The Google Docs viewer allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, .tiff, .doc and .docx files in your browser. Just click the 'View' link at the bottom of the message. 5. Find that long-lost attachment If you're looking for an attachment someone has sent to you, Gmail's advanced search operators can help you find what you're looking for quickly and accurately e.g. 'has:attachment pdf'. Recent launches To learn more about recent launches, watch this recorded webinar that spotlights some of the 50+ improvements and new features we brought to Google Apps in the first half of 2010. We also have monthly webinars that you can attend where we discuss recently-released features in Google Apps Premier Edition. Help your users Help your users quickly learn the basics of Gmail and Google Calendar by distributing weekly Google Apps Tips and Tricks within your organisation. Google Apps Tips and Tricks are designed to help educate your users about Google Apps and to help acquaint them with new functionality. You can distribute most of these tips in any order that suits. We've also created a guide for you on how to set up, copy and distribute the weekly tips and tricks to users in your organization which we recommend you read first. |