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Built in the cloud. Engineered for your enterprise.
Sync Google Apps user accounts with your LDAP system
Thursday, April 30, 2009
As part of the team that joined Google when it acquired Postini in 2007,
one of my responsibilities has been finding ways to weave Postini's enterprise experience into Google's business offerings. Today, I'm excited to tell you about
Google Apps Directory Sync
, the latest improvement to Google Apps brought over from Google's
Postini security and archiving
services.
Google Apps Directory Sync lets businesses and schools with an LDAP user directory system like Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino transition more quickly and smoothly to Google Apps. Instead of manually maintaining a separate user account directory in Google Apps, this utility lets Google Apps tap into an existing repository of user account information.
This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.
This is a one-way operation, designed so data on the LDAP server is not updated or altered. The utility offers many of the customization settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool to give complex organizations the controls they need to manage their directories effectively.
Google Apps Directory Sync is now included at no additional cost with Google Apps Premier, Education and Partner Edition customers.
Posted by Navneet Goel, Google Enterprise Product Manager
Exciting, useful sessions at Google I/O...be there!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Google I/O Developer Conference is coming up in just four weeks, on May 27
–
28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, so we thought now would be a good time to give you a sneak preview into some of the exciting Enterprise
sessions
we have planned.
Growing a SaaS-based services business reselling Google Apps
presented by Jeff Ragusa
Traditional value-added resellers are looking for ways to adapt their business for the world of cloud computing and the new Google Apps Authorized Reseller program provides the perfect framework for moving a services business in this direction. This session will focus on revenue opportunities for partners in this area ranging from assisting with SaaS product selection, to guidance on best practices, to custom application development, deployment & integration work, and managed services. Learn how Google's reseller program can enable service providers to take advantage of these opportunities through marketing, sales and technical tools and resources. See Jeff's video invitation to his session
here
.
Extending the Google Search Appliance to Crawl Valuable Data Behind the Firewell
presented by Nitin Mangtani
The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox. See Nitin's video invitation to his session
here
.
OpenSocial in the Enterprise
presented by Chris Schalk, Mark Wentzel, Dave Carroll, Rich Manalang, and Tugdual Grall
With OpenSocial's proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they've successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.
One last thing to remember: even though Google I/O will be primarily geared around breakout sessions, there will be a ton of other
interesting stuff going on
, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks and After Hours Playground. Click
here
to register.
Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team
What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for
The Uptime Institute
, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey's interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we'd like to join the conversation
Appirio
and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.
There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those adv
antages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft.
In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of
all
sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.
Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components.
We serve tens of millions of users, s
o we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.
In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.
Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.
Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.
Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for
energy efficiency
. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently
shared that the average PUE for our data centers
is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.
Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.
But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to.
According to Gartner
, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.
Software Infrastructure
While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.
In contrast, w
ith a service
like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.
A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House wa
s able to instantly scale its database
to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.
Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.
There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud.
That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly
less than 1/3 the cost
of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storag
e, and innovates much faster.
Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, wit
h Google Apps
, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.
The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.
As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?
Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps
Policy-enforced TLS in Google Apps
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
In the year and a half since we acquired Postini, we've integrated a number of their message security features into Google Apps Premier Edition, including additional spam and virus filtering, content policy management tools, and archiving. Today we're pleased to announce the addition of another feature to Google Apps that many of you have been asking for: policy-enforced
Transport Layer Security
(TLS, RFC 2246) to help you secure the transport of messages between domains with a simple point-and-click interface.
With policy-enforced TLS, IT administrators can
set up policies for securely sending and receiving mail between specific domains. For example, you could specify that all external mail sent by your accounting team members with your bank be secured with the TLS standard, and defer if TLS is not possible. Similarly, you could mandate a secure TLS connection between your domain and your outside legal counsel, auditors, and any other partners with whom your employees may trade sensitive communications. The new functionality makes it easy for an IT admin to use the TLS standard
for
reliable, secure email delivery – with no hardware or software to add or maintain.
We're also making a change to the message discovery and archiving feature in Google Apps for new customers. We've learned that
most o
f our customers want at least one year of archiving, so the 90-day message archive is no longer being offered to customers who sign up after
April 22
. All customers can continue to buy one year of message archiving with unlimited storage for
$13 pe
r user per year, and up to 10 years of archiving with unlimited storage for
$33 per use
r per year. Note that those of you already using Premier Edition will continue to be able to retain mail for 90 days.
Enforce an email footer to apply to outbound emails.
On the 'Outbound Servers' tab, set your TLS policies easily in the Google Postini Admin console. Settings can apply to inbound and outbound messages.
Let us know what you think about today's news. We're committed to providing the world class security and compliance technology you need in an easy and affordable way, and we welcome your comments and feedback.
Posted by Navneet Goel and Matt O'Connor, Product Managers, Google Postini services team
Update from the Google Apps ecosystem: Ping Identity and PivotLink
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
A few weeks ago we hosted one of our
Google Campfire One events
to announce new developer tools that we think businesses will find pretty interesting.
Several companies participated in the event
by sharing how these tools improve their products and services.
PivotLink
and
Ping Identity
were two participants, and both have recently had customers successfully deploy their solutions.
DMA, a national food service distributor,
chose PivotLink's Software-as-a-Service business intelligence solution
to give their employees greater visibility into supply chain information. DMA's users needed to visualize their data within Google Apps and iGoogle alongside other business information, news, and market data. To solve this, DMA is using the
PivotLink gadget
, which users can embed in applications like Google Sites to access PivotLink's reporting and analytics tools.
SURFNet, the group that runs the national research and educational network for The Netherlands,
chose to replace their proprietary Single Sign On (SSO) solution with PingFederate
, Ping Identity's standards-based SSO product. SURFNet chose PingFederate because it could integrate with a variety of internet SSO implementations, be deployed quickly, and let their users access Google Apps and other cloud-based applications with a single set of login credentials.
Want to learn more about how a solutions provider can help your business? Visit the
Solutions Marketplace
to find additional products and services, or read more customer stories on the
Marketplace customer success blog
.
Learn about the latest updates from the app developer community. Remember to check out the Google I/O Developer Conference on May 27 & 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California.
Learn more
.
Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Apps Partners team
We have a winner! News on the "Where's Your Google Search Appliance?" contest
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Back in February we
announced a contest
challenging our customers to show us their
Google Search Appliances
and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming
Google IO conference
, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at
Atlanta'sWellStar Health System
, we knew we had a winner.
WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly
Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:
Before GSA:
With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.
After GSA:
Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.
After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.
We had a few other standouts. Here's one.
Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search
Meet Chris with the
State of Missouri
in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Before GSA:
The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.
After GSA:
After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.
From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.
In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their
GSAs we have more success stories
here.
Thanks for your participation and don't forget to
register
for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!
Posted by
Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team
It's About Usage
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
In 1992, James Carville coined the phrase, "It's the Economy, Stupid" a cornerstone of Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign. Mr. Carville correctly identified – among the many factors at play – that the concerns about the economy trumped all other issues of the day.
Often, in the enterprise search world, industry pundits and certainly the search vendors (Google included) talk more about the many factors than the most important one: usage. There is, of course, relevancy of results, which we certainly believe is very important, and many other factors such as reach, security, ease of administration, and total cost of ownership.
All of these factors matter to enterprises, just as, say, health care and foreign policy mattered to economy-watchers in 1992.
But at the end of the day, users know best. Increased usage trumps all other factors, because it takes relevancy into account. It takes usability into account. It takes reach into account. Business users will not use a system if it doesn't successfully search the important company repositories and return the information they need.
Because of this, data from our Google Enterprise Search customers is very insightful. Below is a live chart that one of our large pharmaceutical customers recently shared with us: a significant increase in their intranet usage after switching to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) from another vendor's solution.
What's encouraging for us is that this is not a unique story; a large number of our customers report back similar metrics. Whether on their website or their intranet, users value the Google search box. At
Medtronic
, for instance, intranet traffic tripled since the GSA deployment. At
BP
, intranet and website search increased by over 80%. And at
Discovery Communications
, the number of website searches has grown by more than 70% since deploying the GSA.
Increasingly, IT organizations are realizing the importance of usage, because it's usually a reflection of search satisfaction. And from the IT perspective, nothing is more satisfying than deploying a system that users will appreciate.
Posted by Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager
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