Google Apps highlights – 6/18/2010 this week
Over the last couple of weeks we introduced several new features to Google Docs, and made updates to Gmail, Buzz and Blogger. The Google Apps Marketplace expanded, and we brought many new businesses and schools onboard. Here’s the scoop:
New Google Docs editors rolling out to everyone
Just a couple months ago we started previewing Google Docs’ new editors for documents and spreadsheets, and on Monday we began turning on these faster, more feature-rich editors for everyone. In new documents, you’ll see character-by-character real-time collaboration, a ruler for custom margins and tab stops, and the files you import from your computer will be much higher quality. The new version of spreadsheets is faster, and includes a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete and much more. If your university, employer or organization provides you with a Google Docs account, you’ll start seeing the new editors by default in the coming weeks, too.
New sharing settings in Google Docs
Just yesterday we launched a streamlined way to share your files more easily in Google Docs. You can set a document, spreadsheet, presentation or drawing to be “Private,” available to “Anyone with the link,” or “Public on the web,” and then customize who has access by inviting specific collaborators. If you’re using Google Docs at work or at school, you’ll also see options that make it easy to share your files just with other people within your organization. Learn more about the new sharing options on the Google Docs blog.
New features for drawings in Google Docs
We introduced several new features for the drawings editor in Google Docs, too. Now you can center objects on the page, resize your entire canvas, view thumbnails of your drawings in your doc list, search across your drawings by text contained within and quickly view a list of handy editing keyboard shortcuts. We also added the ability for you to share drawings in the Google Docs template gallery, so other people around the world can use your creations.
Blogger Template Designer available to all
Back in March we introduced Blogger Template Designer in Blogger in Draft, and last week we made it available to everyone. You can choose from more than 19 stock templates and further customize your design with hundreds of free, professional background images, custom color schemes and pixel-perfect layout manipulation. Customizing your blog and making it “your own” is now much easier.
Google Maps previews in Gmail and Buzz
Last week, we added a new Labs feature in Gmail that automatically displays a Google Map below messages that contain street addresses—saving you the trouble of copying and pasting of addresses from Gmail to Google Maps. You can enable this feature and many others from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings. Google Buzz also integrates Google Maps now too; when your buzz includes a Google Maps link, you’ll automatically see an image of the map that you can choose to include in your post.
Apps Marketplace
For the businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps, cloud-based functionality continues to expand through the Google Apps Marketplace. There, developers around the world can offer business- and process-enhancing apps that seamlessly integrate with Google Apps. The Marketplace has everything from accounting applications and CRM solutions to marketing automation and project workflow tools. Last week we added five new applications, and this Tuesday we tacked on over a dozen more.
Who’s gone Google?
We’re thrilled to welcome Brady Corporation, a globally distributed safety and security products company with more than 7,000 employees and 90 globally distributed business locations, to Google Apps. Cost savings were a factor in the decision, but Brady’s IT team chose Google Apps to simplify their worldwide IT operations, to streamline the integration of future acquisitions and to offer employees advanced sharing features like real-time collaboration.
In addition to the big guys, tens of thousands more small and medium size businesses have also gone Google since our last update, including Hiatus Spa + Retreat, Goble & Associates and Método DeRose Matosinhos. Welcome!
And school’s out for summer, but many colleges and universities are using the quiet months to reinvigorate their student technology. Sonoma State University, Meharry Medical College, Tokyo Keizai University (translated), Santa Fe Community College, Great Basin College and Colby College are all going Google.
Whether your company or school has already gone Google or if you’re just starting to contemplate the move, tune into our live webcast next Tuesday, June 22 at 9:00 am PDT to hear more about the improvements and new features we’ve added to Google Apps during the first half of 2010.
For more details and updates from the Apps team, head on over to the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo
Google Services: Use Google Services from the Command Line
Not every one likes beautiful interfaces with big buttons, controls for entering text and uploading files. Sometimes it’s faster to type commands in a terminal.
GoogleCL is a project that makes it easy to use Google services like Blogger, Picasa Web, YouTube, Google Docs ans Google Calendar from the command-line. It’s a wrapper for the Google Data APIs, so you first need to install Python 2.6 (or 2.5) and Google Data APIs Python Client Library.
It’s not very difficult to install a Python package. For example, in Windows you need to extract the archive, open the folder in Windows Explorer, shift + right-click in a blank space, select “Open command window here” and type: python setup.py install.
After installing Python, Google Data APIs Python Client Library and Google CL, you can type commands that let you upload photos to Picasa Web, upload videos to YouTube, publish Blogger posts, add events to Google Calendar, find Gmail contacts and more.
Here are some of my favorite commands:
google calendar add “Meet Mary tomorrow at 10am”
(add an event to Google Calendar)
google picasa get “Album Title” c:\files\picasa\
(download the files from one of your albums)
google picasa create –title “Miami Beach” c:\files\photos\miami\*.jpg
(upload photos to a new Picasa Web album)
google youtube post –title “Summer in Rome” c:\videos\rome.avi
(upload a video to YouTube)
google docs get –title “Reports .*”
(download documents that have titles starting with “Reports” as text files)
google docs upload c:\files\*.doc
(upload the *.doc files from a folder to Google Docs)
For a more comprehensive list of commands, type google –help or read the manual.
{ via Google Open Source Blog }
Google Apps : 16 new apps available for your users in the Apps Marketplace
Google launched 16 new apps from 3rd party developers, available in the Google Apps Marketplace. Many of these apps are free or have a free trials and include CRM, email marketing, project management, and online design tools among others. You can add these integrated applications to your Google Apps subscription with just a few clicks.
How to access what’s new:
- Go to http://www.google.com/appsmarketplace
- Choose an app from the project management, CRM, or email marketing categories, among others.
- Click the blue ‘Add it now’ button to add the app for your users.
For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/launched-in-apps-marketplace-16-new.html
Google Earth5.2 Includes a Web Browser
Google Earth 5.2 no longer uses the operating system’s web browser when you click on links. Google Earth comes with a WebKit-based browser, so you’ll never have to leave the application to open a Wikipedia page or the website of a local business.
“Sometimes when you want more information, you may want to click through to a link to see the full Google Places page for a business, or learn more about a photographer whose photo you really enjoy. In the past, this has required opening a link in an external browser to see the full page. For Google Earth 5.2, we’ve added an embedded browser that lets you browse the full web. Click on a link, and the browser pane slides across the screen. When you want to return to the Earth view, just click the Back button,” explains Google.
Apparently, Google Earth uses a simplified version of Google Chrome and it doesn’t include the V8 Javascript engine. I tried to run the V8 benchmark suite in Google Earth and the result was very poor: about 10 times lower than the latest Chromium build.
As in the previous versions, Google Earth for Windows and Mac also includes a plug-in that lets you embed a Google Earth view in any web page. Google Maps is the most popular service that lets you use Google Earth in your browser. Now you can browse the Web in Google Earth and use Google Earth in a Web browser.
If you don’t like the embedded browser, you can disable it by going to Tools > Options > General and checking “Show web results in external browser”.
Google Docs: Drawing templates added to Google Docs template gallery
Drawing templates have now been added to the public docs template gallery. Drawing templates can also now be uploaded to a domain’s own template gallery, if administrators have enabled that feature.
- Sign in to Google Docs and in the docs list, click on ‘Create new’ then ‘From template’ to create a new document from a template. In the ‘Public Templates’ tab, ‘Drawings’ is now a category in the ‘type’ section and you can find the available templates by clicking on that link.
- If your domain administrator has enabled docs templates just for your domain, the ‘drawings’ link is also now in that domain’s templates tab. Administrators can enable domain-only docs templates from the Control Panel > Service settings > Docs > Templates (Premier and Education Editions only).
For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/share-your-drawings-with-google-docs.html
Google Maps Navigation for Canada and more 10 European Countries
Google Maps Navigation for Android is now available for Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland, in addition to the 3 countries that were already supported: US, UK and Ireland. It’s interesting to notice that Google still uses data from Tele Atlas for all the countries supported by Google Maps Navigation, except for the US and Canada.
“Google Maps Navigation is an Internet-connected GPS navigation or ‘satnav’ system that provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps. Google Maps Navigation (beta) with Search by voice is available in version 4.2 of Google Maps, on Android devices 1.6 and higher,” explains Google.
Free turn-by-turn navigation could be an important reason why people choose a mobile phone, so Google and Nokia try to make the most of Google Maps Navigation for Android and Ovi Maps for Symbian. Most likely, in the near future, all smartphones will include a free application for navigation.
In other related news, Google Search by Voice is now available for German, Italian, Spanish and French. Search by voice is an important feature of the Quick Search Box app for Android, Google Mobile App for iPhone and Blackberry. The nice thing is that you don’t have to download an update for none of the applications, as the new languages are automatically recognized.
Google Caffeine: Indexing the Web More Faster
Google announced today that new indexing system called Caffeine is live. The goal is to find fresh content faster, to index web pages faster and to update the index in real-time.
“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you. With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index,” explains Google.
Now that the index is updated in real-time, you’ll find recent information faster, sometimes a few minutes after it’s posted. Matt Cutts says that you’ll sometimes find web pages that weren’t indexed when you started typing your query. This is really incredible, even though it’s still very difficult to rank recent web pages.
To find recent web pages, click on “past 24 hours” or “past week” in Google’s right sidebar (the screenshot shows Google’s old interface). You can even sort the results by date.
Gmail Introduces video chat, voice chat and group chat in Gmail
The chat window has been updated to make it easier to make video chats, voice chats and group chats. It’s also now easier to invite people to install the video chat plugin.
How to access what’s new:
- Open a new chat window to see the new icons and toolbar at the top of the window. If your chat buddy doesn’t have the plugin, clicking on the new camera icon in the chat window will invite them to install it.
- The other options such as “Go off the record,” “Block” are now in the “Actions” menu of each chat window.
For more information:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/making-it-easier-to-video-chat-voice.html
Google Maps: Now Previews Google Map in your Gmail
Gmail added a new Labs feature that parses your messages and lets you preview some content using web services. This time you can preview the addresses from a message using Google Maps. The addresses extracted by Gmail are displayed after a message and you can load a map preview without opening a new page. Right now, the feature only works for US addresses, but Google promises to address this issue.
Gmail already displays addresses from messages in the right sidebar, but you need to click on a link to open the map in a new page. The new Gmail Labs feature has another advantage: it also previews links to Google Maps.
Gmail’s blog says that a map preview feature is now available for Google Buzz, but it only works when you paste a Google Maps link in a Buzz message. Unfortunately, Google’s thumbnails is really small and clicking on the thumbnail opens a static map.
To find the Labs feature, open Gmail Labs and use your browser’s find-on-page feature (Ctrl+F / Cmd-F) to search for “Google Maps previews”. Gmail Labs offers other similar contextual gadgets for previewing links to Flickr, Picasa Web, Yelp, Google Voice messages, Google Docs and the YouTube preview feature is enabled by default. Developers can create custom contextual gadgets for Gmail in Google Apps and hopefully the APIs will be extended to the regular Gmail app.
Win $75 American Express gift checks to test new Blogger features on Windows PCs, Google contest
Google is calling testers to test usability of its Blogger service feedback on something that’s currently in development. “We’re currently scheduling participants for a 60 minutes study that takes place June 17-23, 2010. Sessions will be remote – basically we’ll call you on phone and set up a screen sharing session with you on your computer. You’ll need a high-speed Internet connection (DSL, Cable, T1), a PC running Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, must be at least 18 years old, speaker phone or hands-free headset, must allow to video or audio record the session,” Google writes.
You’ll receive $75 in American Express gift checks as a token of our appreciation. If interested in participating;
More Info :http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/06/help-us-improve-blogger.html
Sign up here.
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