Google+ Events in Google Calendar

Google+ offers a new way to create, capture and share public and private events. Google+ Events are seamlessly integrated with Google Calendar to simplify the planning process, so you’ll always know when you have something coming up.

When creating a Google+ event, you can check your Google Calendar to make sure you pick the best time to organize a meeting. Google+ events is also synchronized to your mobile device’s calendar, so you can easily check upcoming events.

In week and day views in Calendar, you’ll recognize Google+ Events by the event owner’s profile picture. When you click to expand the event in Calendar, it displays a theme and allows you to set reminders, see other guests, and directly join  the event.

Google Apps Vault helps companies of all sizes to easily and safely manage their most important information. It can help businesses to prepare for the unexpected and reduce the cost of litigation, regulatory investigations and compliance measures.

Google Apps Vault was developed to provide easier to use capabilities for archiving, retention and e-discovery for businesses. Until now, many small and medium enterprises have not been able to deploy solutions such as Vault due to the cost and complexity of the project. But now, customers can purchase Google Apps Vault online directly from the Control Panel.

The features of Google Apps Vault can be added to your Google Apps account for 5 $ more per user per month.

The duration of archiving is not limited in time, unlike Postini which was limited to 10 years. However, Google Apps Vault will completely replace Postini over time.

Google Apps Vault is currently only available for new Google Apps for Business and Education customers. Google Apps Vault will be available in the upcoming weeks.

Since August Google+ features were designed specifically for businesses, but are still in preview mode. During this preview period, organizations that have gone Google will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013 while more features and administrative controls designed for organizations are being added.

Private sharing for your organization
As a Google Apps user, you now have more control over the content you post to Google+. When you create a post you can mark it as restricted. Restricted posts are private to your organization and can never be re-shared with anyone outside. At the same time, when you create a post, you have the flexibility to share it with specific partners or colleagues outside the organization as well if you choose.

Restricted posts cannot be shared outside the organization

Video meetings integrated with Gmail, Calendar and Docs
When you’re on Google Apps, holding a face-to-face meeting with colleagues or clients around the world doesn’t require coordinated travel schedules or expensive video conferencing technology. All you need is a device with a camera and an internet connection. Hangouts lets up to 10 people join a video meeting from their laptop, phone or tablet.

People can now join a multi-way video chat, powered by Hangouts, directly from Gmail. They can also open a Google doc in a hangout meeting, making it easy for colleagues to write or edit a document together from anywhere. Users can also add a hangout to a Calendar event, allowing attendees to join the meeting directly from the invite or Calendar entry (you can also choose where the event is taking place, whether using Hangou or other means).

Add a hangout to a calendar event

Work on a doc face-to-face in a hangout

Administrative Controls
To help make sure users are sharing only with the people they intend, administrators can now set company-wide defaults for post restrictions. They can also enable restricted Hangouts to facilitate private meetings within the company.

It is important to point out that for the moment, you should download Google Drive individually. The transition from Google Docs to Google Drive will be taken care of progressively.

Google Drive is the replacement for Google Docs. Docs features are preserved while being enhanced by the new Drive.

Google Drive’s key points

Google Drive helps you save your Data on your local disk.

When you use Google Drive for the first time, it is proposed to install a client on your computer (local client). It is important to highlight the fact that the local client of Google Drive still does not replace the synchronization software such as Box.net or Insync, because what is recorded via Drive are not the files themselves, but links to your documents.

Regardless, when you click on one of your documents through your browser, it will open your document into your browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc …). The full synchronization of your files will be installed later, for now, it must still be connected to the internet to access it. It is therefore recommended to use Drive with clients such as Box or Insync.

A Mac version is also available, and you can also download “Drive” app for your shelf or your smart-phone Android, iOS soon. Another interesting point is the ability to search your files by keywords and even set up filters to search based on file type, author, etc …

Adorn your Drive with useful apps

A major advantage of using Google Drive is the ability to add applications directly managed by other publishers. For example, if you need to create a “Mind Map”, you can add the application “MindMeister” from the menu “Create” by clicking “more” then “integrate other applications”. Clicking this button will redirect you to the Google Chrome Webstore. Other applications such as Balsamiq, Evernote, Slide Rocket, etc …, are also available.

Purchase of centralized storage space

In conclusion

With Google Drive, creating, sharing, and collaborating becomes meaningful. Since Drive was developed in the Google Apps environment, you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, as you were already doing with Google Docs.

Great things are expected of Google Drive.

For the moment, more than 35 000 employees have access to it, thus already using the collaborative and communication features available with Google Apps.

• Gmail and Google Chat
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Groups
• Google Sites
• Google Videos and more

The full migraton will be over by mid-2012. By then, the 110 000 employees at BBVA located over 26 countries will be fully using Google Apps.

A few months ago, Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace, a list of additional services grafted on Google Apps, and offered by third party publishers. Google Apps became then a complete “platform” ecosystem, aligned with new mobile’s app stores paradigm, or like force.com offers from Salesforce.

It is clear that this platform vision is a real success. This success is due to its ease of adoption, thanks to the fact that the applications are hosted, available as SaaS and Clouds. One click and any application you need for your information system becomes available.

Google, always one step ahead

Google is once again one step ahead of its competitors, Microsoft and IBM, who are launching their own equivalents of Google Apps.

What do we find in the Google Apps Marketplace? CRM services, mind-maps services, drawings services, enterprise social networking-class services, projects management services, billing and bookkeeping services, e-mailing services, workflow services,..

All these services have access to your Google Apps data, and can actually interact with your mail or documents data. For example, the workflow services will be able to read or write the informations in your spreadsheets documents and automate a number of tasks for supplying or collecting  data, with validation by different people following a determined process.

For example, a small company that is starting its business and wants to build a solid and modern  information system to support its activity, will only have to license Google Apps, CRM, billing, bookkeeping, e-mailing  and workflow related services. This will equip it as well as a much larger company having invested huge amounts of money to build a similar architecture, with the help of a team of IT specialists to manage the whole thing. Here, the services are available without maintenance, software updates, storage costs, or IT staff  dedicated to its support. The goal is direct effectiveness and more reliability that any traditional IT  department could deliver.

All this was impossible just a few months ago. We are witnessing an unprecedented democratization of business information systems.

This will forever change the computing landscape and provide real opportunities for all organizations, regardless of the size and budget, to work with professional tools in all areas of their information system. This should substantially increase the performance of the enterprises and their impact on the global economy. First the Web has allowed SMBs to reach unexplored markets (the long tail effect), now Cloud Services and platforms allow them to manage advanced information systems that they couldn’t afford in the past.

What price for the services of the Marketplace?

Marketplace services generally aim to offer relatively low cost of entry, but it is not clear that all the providers of such services are adopting the right business models. Keeping in mind that Google Apps are charged at 40€ per year per user, we can easily think that additional services will be charged at a lower price than the Google Apps licenses. It is the case of services like RunMyProcess (30€/ year per user) or SocialWok ($36/year per user). But there are also many other services that charge as much as $10/month per user.

Some Google Apps additional services cost 2 to 4 times more than Google Apps, is it justified? If the client must license multiples services together, the cost may soon be  relatively important, and will slow the rate of adoption, at least for small businesses.

I think that some of the service providers have not really taken a comprehensive view of the market, and, as there is no established competition either, the market is not self-regulating yet. The experience of the Apple store shows how the prices have evolved after its launch: Low prices quickly became the norm, because developers quickly realized it was better to sell more units at a lower price. Competition has accelerated this realization. It seems that many of the participants in the Google Apps Marketplace have not fully accepted this yet, which will undoubtedly slow down their adoption rate.

The ExamGeneral example

At Kimind, we encourage our clients to go forward and integrate this market reality in the definition of their online business services. That’s what we did with ExamGeneral, a specialized service for creating and taking online tests and exams. It has been designed by Kimind, then realized and produced on behalf of the Californien start-up ExamGeneral. Since March, when the Marketplace preview was presented, we submitted the initial functional specifications for the management team, with associated business model, in order to demonstrate the significant potential for ExamGeneral to thrive with the online release of such an additional service.

In addition, as ExamGeneral addresses mainly the education market, there is a double benefit. Google Apps for Education is used by more than 8 million students around the World. ExamGeneral can reach this market at once, just by being present in the Google Apps Marketplace

Our teams are currently working on the realization of the interface with Google Apps, and ExamGeneral should be available in the marketplace by mid-September. The integration is made at several levels: first at the user authentication level, which relies on Google’s; then it gets into the data itself, where teachers can link their courses and their documents reviews from their Google Docs; finally the test results will be automatically loaded into a Google Spreadsheet to be consolidated and shared.

ExamGeneral is a perfect example of Integration of an external service to the marketplace, which will benefit both from the Google ecosystem to increase its market presence, and make additional services available to users that ExamGeneral would not have developed on their own. Google will thus indirectly propose an online review service backed by Google Apps to its millions of users .

Conclusion

If you are a SaaS provider and you’re reading these lines, give a lot of thought about taking advantage of this opportunity. Your decisions will help shape the market, which is still in early stages. When competitors from different domains have come to the Marketplace, it will be harder to differentiate your business proposition. But for now, it has just started, and it is the right time to invest. Furthermore, projects usually have short term objectives, so the first level of adaptation is simple, and the rest can be developed incrementally.

Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss and brainstorm on the different possible options.

This is an important addition to the security capabilities of Google Apps. In the case of a lost laptop, for example, all open connections could be instantly terminated, preventing unauthorized access to the organization’s information.

The function is found in the user tab of the dashboard, and only available to administrators.