Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager,

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information--from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.

Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:

• formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
• Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
• Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 

We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more helpful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks.

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Apoorv Saxena, Product Manager, Google Apps for Business

There are thousands of third-party applications that integrate with Google Apps for Business to help people to do more on the web and accomplish specific business tasks. These include apps like Mavenlink (project management), Insightly (customer relationship management), and myERP (business management). Starting today, administrators will be able to find, manage and deploy third-party applications, like these, directly from the Google Apps Admin console.

To start, over twenty third-party applications will be available in the Admin console. These applications all offer the latest OAuth 2.0 security, single sign-on (SSO), and integration with Google services. Admins can now see reviews from verified users of the applications to help select the best app to meet their needs. As additional applications are updated, they will become available to Admins directly from the Admin console. In the meantime, all third-party applications are available as always in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Many admins have asked for greater control of third-party applications. With this upgrade, third-party applications are moving to OAuth 2.0. This means admins can deploy applications only to specific people or organizational units (rather than the entire company) and developers can design apps to request more narrow access to corporate information.

To learn more about how to add third-party applications that work with Google Apps for Business, visit our Help Center.

If you are a developer and would like to learn more about these changes and to see how to migrate your application for easier development and deployment, visit the Google Apps Developer website.