Posted by Ronan Hughes, CTO at Directski.com

Editor's Note: Next up, we’d like to welcome Ronan Hughes, Chief Technical Officer at Directski.com, a web based travel company based in Dublin. Directski.com migrated to Google Apps six months ago with the help of Google Apps Authorized Reseller, Baker Security & Networks. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Directski.com have been in business for over ten years, with a mission to make ski holidays more affordable for all. As a 100% web based company, Directski.com doesn’t have glossy brochures, expensive middlemen, high street shops or call centers. We’ve developed a market leading website that has been designed specifically for the sale of ski holidays. We have 30 full time employees and large numbers of seasonal staff that provide ski packages to over 200 European ski destinations.

Effective use of technology has been a key driver and cornerstone of our success. For example, we have used open source products to provide us with scalable, flexible and secure IT systems that have allowed us to grow rapidly but in a cost effective and pragmatic manner. We are always thinking about how technology can simplify and enhance our business processes so that we continually live up to our mission of helping our customers to “ski for less.”

Recently we examined how cloud computing could help us keep this advantage over our competitors. One product that quickly caught our attention was Google Apps and we implemented it across our organisation. The migration to Google Apps was seamless and our employees love it. It’s a huge improvement on our old system and it simply takes care of itself. Our employees find it very intuitive and the combination of Gmail, video sharing, chat and Google Docs allows for great team collaboration across our 5 offices.

Google Apps has numerous advantages for us; it has helped us control our costs, allowing us to focus on the core IT projects that will will add value for our customers, and, in turn, for our business. It is easy to use and offers cutting-edge functionality. Required training is minimal which is very important to us given the large number of seasonal staff we employ. Being a fast-paced, nimble travel company, accessibility is of paramount importance to our team and Google Apps provides this for us.

We’re so impressed with our migration to Google Apps that we’ve put together a quick video to tell you more! We would recommend Google Apps to any faced paced, innovative company.

Posted by Joanne Schneider, Google Apps Small Business Team

In honor of National Small Business Week, we’d like to take time this week to share ways that Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace can help small businesses work more productively and efficiently.

Today, we’re highlighting a few of the Small Business Web apps in the Google Apps Marketplace, and how our customers run their businesses on them every day. Google shares the Small Business Web’s dedication to providing tools that have enterprise-grade functionality, as well as align with small businesses’ priorities.

Apps that work together
Particularly for companies without a dedicated IT team or person, the list of necessary business tools can quickly become unmanageable. Web apps that provide deep integrations with Google Apps and with each other are especially useful for growing businesses that don’t have time to manage multiple, distinct applications.

Olark lets customers live chat with website visitors directly from the Gmail interface through Google Talk, and provides easy access to chat transcripts. Peter Macaulay of KitchenwareDirect.com.au says, “The ability to live chat with customers without leaving the Google Apps interface is a huge productivity advantage. The simple and elegant implementation meant we were up and running in a matter of minutes. Staff members are easily able to set their availability for chat, enabling them to easily multi-task.”

WORKetc is another app that makes Gmail into the front end workspace, but for CRM, project management, and customer support. It let’s you easily share emails related to particular projects with relevant team members without forwarding or copying other email addresses. D. Hogan of Varis Energy says, “Any emails that need to be shared with my team get tagged in the WORKetc gadget that is built right into Gmail. This immediately lets everyone else who is assigned to a project or lead have access to the new information from the received email.”

Access all the time
As compared to larger businesses, small businesses are even less suited to managing servers, and tend to have many employees on the road or in non-office locations. Accessing their data and documents from anywhere, on any Internet-connected device is a core benefit of using web-based tools like Google Docs. OfficeDrop digitizes paper documents to make them text-searchable in Google Docs. Greg Skidmore of Belpointe Asset Management says, “Each month we send a box of paper files to OfficeDrop and have them scanned directly into Google Docs. If I have a document that I need scanned right away, I use OfficeDrop’s scanning software, ScanDrop, and upload it immediately.”

Easy to Use
Small business owners and employees often wear a lot of hats and they’ve asked for solutions that are easy to learn and use. Michael Bower of Michael Bower Digital says, “I always need to know where my money is, without wasting time organizing my paperwork. As my business grew, I was losing control of my cashflow. Both Google Apps and FreshBooks have just enough features to keep my workflow and invoicing organized, allowing me to focus on my work.”

These are just a few examples of the many Small Business Web app vendors in the Google Apps Marketplace who provide the functionality and integrations a small business needs. Over 30 Google Apps Marketplace apps have already joined the Small Business Web and declared their commitment to helping small businesses focus on what they do best. They include:

Finance Bill.com billFLO EchoSign Expensify FreeAgent Freshbooks Harvest Kashoo Outright Shoeboxed

CRM Assistly Batchbook CRM Capsule CRM Connect2Field Disqourse CRM Get Satisfaction PipelineDeals SAManage Solve360 CRM Tactile CRM WorkETC

Doc Management Box.net FormLizard OfficeDrop Collaboration MindMeister Teambox uberVU YoolinkPro

Sales and Marketing Mailchimp Olark SiteKreator VerticalResponse zferral

We celebrate National Small Business Week to recognize the importance of small businesses for promoting a healthy economy, and we’re excited to help them continue to grow and succeed through the smart use of technology.

Google is a supporter of small businesses around the world. We have a number of services, including Adwords, Google Places, and Google Apps, that help small businesses find and engage customers and run their businesses more efficiently.

The good news for small businesses is we’re not alone. There are thousands of companies and organizations worldwide dedicated to helping them, and today we’re proud to formally join one such organization who’s focus is helping small businesses get more out of web apps: The Small Business Web.

The Small Business Web is a group of web app vendors rallying together around a couple simple ideas:

• the belief that web apps are more valuable when they integrate and work together
• the belief that open web APIs are the best way to integrate web apps

We share these beliefs -- they’re some of the same principles behind our Google Apps Marketplace and our belief in 100% web.

In fact 30 of the 300+ web apps available in the Apps Marketplace are also members of The Small Business Web, including:

Freshbooks Batchbook CRM Mailchimp Outright Shoeboxed Solve360 CRM Assistly Get Satisfaction Box.net Harvest

FreeAgent Capsule CRM Bill.com Expensify Pipeline Deals uberVU Teambox Tactile CRM SiteKreator Kashoo

MindMeister Connect2Field Disqourse CRM OfficeDrop SAManage billFLO VerticalResponse YouCalc YoolinkPro zferral

We are excited to join The Small Business Web, and look forward to collaboratively pushing the envelope with fellow vendors on making web apps as good as they can be as we move to a world that’s 100% web.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise

Editor’s Note: Since today is one of the more popular days for wining and dining, we invited Jeff Munsey, co-owner and Vice President of Pithy Little Wine Co., to tell us about his company’s move to Google Apps. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Together with my wife, Felicia, we started Pithy Little Wine Co. a couple of years ago with the goal of crafting great tasting wines that represented the diversity of California’s wine country. We’ve worked in the wine industry for more than 20 years combined and my wife is a third-generation California farmer, giving us a great foundation on which to build a small family winery. We chose the name Pithy because its definition, concise and forcefully expressive, sums up our business and winemaking philosophy. Since then we have grown our business to include other brands - Fortuity, Pithy Little Soda Works and Wino Brand.

Our focus is dominated by our passion for great customer service and compelling products. Managing servers and worrying about email outages aren’t on that list. Knowing our email is always under control allows us to focus more on what’s important - our customers.

Gmail’s reliability gives us the peace of mind that we’ll always be able to respond to our customers right away. We live on the California Central Coast where the occasional bad storm or high winds can cause power outages. Additionally, our winery tasting room is located in a historic building in the heart of Downtown San Luis Obispo. Between bad weather and old wiring we can’t always rely on our server battery back up to keep our email and website up and running when the power goes out. Our ecommerce orders flow through our email. When we receive an online order or a customer submits a contact form, we get an email alerting us to areas where attention is needed. Running email downtime could delay a response to a customer order or question. With Google Apps’ record for reliability and no planned down time, we don’t worry about servers going down and disrupting our business.


We are days away from launching a whole new part of our business called Drinkwell Creative, a designer wine label program that develops custom wine labels for individuals and businesses. Prospective client inquiries are sent instantly from our website to our corporate Gmail account. Gmail services provide us with the security of knowing that no leads will be lost or delayed due to downtime.

What we enjoy most about Google Apps is not being tied down. It is really important to us as small business owners to be able to contact people from any device, wherever we are. We travel a lot for business, often working at hotels or events. With Google Apps, we know we can get our email, calendar and documents on any of our phones or devices from wherever our business takes us.

Google Apps is always there, even when we’re not looking. During a week like this, when we are shipping wine club orders, Valentine’s Day gifts, and preparing to launch a whole new segment of our business, email, calendar and document sharing are the last thing on our minds.

Posted by Jeff Munsey, Co-founder, Pithy Little Wine Co.

Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Posted by Deanna Yick, Small Business Blog Team

Editor’s note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Sheila Garrison and Kristin Heaton-Peabody, co-founders of Hiatus Spa + Retreat, to explain how Google Apps helped them launch and grow their socially conscious spa in Dallas, Texas. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Pictured: Hiatus Spa + Retreat co-founders Kristin Heaton-Peabody and Sheila Garrison

Our business, Hiatus Spa + Retreat, was born out of necessity. As professionals who worked entirely unreasonable hours, and habitual spa users, we were left with few options that fulfilled our needs for an escape to renew body and mind without breaking our wallets. And as serial entrepreneurs, it didn’t take us long to recognize a significant need in the marketplace for a superlative spa experience at a reasonable price. With that in mind, our core mission was firmly set: to make the world a better place, one spa service at a time.

We started writing the business plan in 2006, which took us nearly a year to perfect, then we started looking at Dallas real estate. We started using Google Apps in fall 2007, before we opened; with founders based in both Dallas and Laguna Beach, California, Docs was essential to helping us finalize details such as our initial spa menu (we wished we’d had Docs when we wrote the business plan!). In December 2007 we opened the doors to Hiatus, a full-service day spa featuring a monthly membership and affordable pricing -- the first of its kind in the United States.

We now have our entire team of 30 using Google Apps. Google Apps is perfectly reflective of who we are as founders: it’s all about transparency, efficiency and environmental consciousness. That’s the way we run our lives and business. Google Apps empowers us to work more effectively than previously imaginable (and we spent more than 15 years working in the technology sector!). Through Google Docs, our ability to sit-down, as a company—in multiple cities—and collaborate on one single document, real-time, has become essential.

I simply can’t imagine going backward. With a team spread across several states (including lawyers and consultants in Chicago), we can work on shared Docs across multiple time zones without missing a beat. Employees can access our employee handbook and other spa documents we use daily, plus we keep our on-call schedule in Google Calendar. If you work at Hiatus, you’ve gone Google!

As our business has grown (we enjoyed 83% growth in 2009 and are on track for a 60% increase in 2010, in an otherwise complicated economy), Google Apps has consistently proved invaluable. With the limitations of traditional inbox mail storage, our team had difficulty storing important documents and retrieving them in a real-time fashion. With Apps, we can de-clutter inboxes and provide consistent up-to-date information via Google Docs.

As any entrepreneur knows, organizational “betterments” happen on a daily basis. The business is always a work in progress, and you can’t rely on the notion that your team always has the latest and greatest information. Hosting our critical documents in the cloud also appeals to our eco-conscious sensibilities -- can you imagine how many trees are being saved on a daily basis from not re-printing employee manuals?

We’re also finding new uses from Docs as we grow, from managing construction and budgeting for our expansion into the space next door to event planning for our screening of “Tapped”, as a fundraiser for the Global Greengrants Fund and the Gulf Restoration Network. We’re still working ridiculous hours, but Google Apps helps us be as efficient as possible -- and now at least we have a sanctuary to find our center.

Find out how going Google can help your organization with the Cloud Calculator.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team

Editor's Note: Pedro Mar is director of Método DeRose Matosinhos Uni-Yoga school in Portugal. Método DeRose provides more than 65 students personalized exercise routines based on an intimate knowledge of each student's needs, as well as healthy eating choices, social activities and creative ways to improve all aspects of his or her life.

When Mar and his team were looking for software to help manage their three year-old business, they needed something as accomodating and personal as the services they provide. Already happy using the Google Apps suite, they turned to the Google Apps Marketplace, and found that they were able to design a solution that perfectly met their needs with BatchBook CRM, which not only met all of their needs for a CRM system, but easily integrated with Google tools and other Marketplace apps they were already using.

Here, Mar shares some insights into the business benefits he has seen since using the Google Apps Marketplace.

Diogo Toledo, Joana Santos and Pedro Mar from Método DeRose Matosinhos

I run an independent yoga school that is part of Uni-Yôga (www.uni-yoga.org), a worldwide network of approximately 150 schools. My business needed a solid customer relationship management (CRM) software program, mainly to keep track of former, current and potential students, but also to provide a good workflow. I was looking for a program that gave me the freedom to customize the data in a way that worked best for my business and suited its needs.

A friend and student of mine recommended searching the Google Apps Marketplace for a CRM software application. I tried several trial versions of some of the solutions offered there and eventually decided on BatchBook. After viewing the tutorial videos offered on the BatchBlue website, I knew I could customize the software to suit all our needs. After using BatchBook for more than two months, I can see the progress we've achieved.

Getting personal with our customers

All of our services are tailored to our clients' health profiles, so it very important that we have the most accurate information about each individual. Since creating our BatchBook account, we have customized the contact information to track things beyond name and address. These include everything we need to know about potential new students; things we learn during our time with our students, such as their birthdays, classes they've taken and experience levels; how often we are communicating with all of our contacts.

We sync BatchBook with our company Gmail app to keep every customer's information updated. We can also track our products and services--like books and workshops --as well as create lists that are important to our business. This all means we can provide better customer service, making our clientele happier and enjoy better, longer relationships with our students.

A workflow that bends to our needs

The to-do template in BatchBook is an amazing feature. Using the template we are able to enter a student’s information upon enrollment. From there we can easily create a scheduled list of tasks for each student to complete up to two years into the future. We use Google Apps to manage several calendars, and we can follow all of the BatchBook to dos right in Google Calendar. This is great for tracking students and their overall progress through our program as we help them achieve one level after another. All of our academic programs, marketing programs, and operational programs are also tracked in the to-do templates, so we are sure not to miss a thing.

Finding the right marketing balance

Our best and most cost effective marketing strategy is communicating, communicating, communicating. We track every e-mail, phone call, cell phone message, class, note, student referral and recommendation in BatchBook. By doing so, we are constantly connected with our network of people. We even use the Rapportive integration with BatchBook and Gmail to obtain social network information we need about a customer right within an e-mail message. It's genius.

We also take advantage of MailChimp's integration with Google Apps and BatchBook to allow different team members to send e-mail newsletters to different groups. Each of the different departments within the school can create their own lists from our list of contacts, and reach out with personalized details about upcoming events, special parties or birthday wishes.

Within one month of using BatchBook our number of students has grown by 10%. We are now managing more than 1,000 contacts in the software and with BatchBlue, we can turn more propects into engaged students. Once we create a file on a prospective student within BatchBlue, we never lose track of him or her. That is a huge value to us.

Previously, we simply had too many other things to worry about. With only four to five instructors at the school, we would easily lose track of a potential student or forget something like a birthday, which is unforgivable in our school's culture of appreciation, attention and trust.

Other programs we tried in the past did not support the rich interaction we have with our students or the workflow that helps us stay on top of the important details like BatchBook, Gmail and Google Calendars does. Using BatchBook, we can now closely monitor our relationship with each student and each lead.

Clearly, BatchBook has made a positive difference in how we run our business. Since using the program, we have improved the quality of our outreach to potential clients, and we have registered new students more easily. With the assistance of the customized to-do templates, integrated with our Google Calendars, we are reminded regularly when to send an email or reach out through another method of communication to a prospective student.

Our success using Google Apps and BatchBook has led me to encourage other schools within the network to do the same. By duplicating our system and taking advantage of our efforts, they can implement the practices into their own business and see firsthand the results we have experienced.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team

Editor's note: This is our fifth and final post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted small businesses (Revenue Spark, Smart Furniture, and Free Range Studios) that have adopted Google Apps, and tips for using Gmail at work. Today, we’ll hear the story of one more entrepreneur and discuss how you can share your own.

Among many things, Vinny Lingham is an entrepreneur, CEO, search engine marketer, and recipient of numerous business related awards including the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader (2009), the Top ICT Young Entrepreneur in Africa (2006), and the Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneur (2006). Currently, Vinny is serving as the CEO of Yola.com – a San Francisco based startup company that offers easy-to-use, browser based website creation software for over 3 million users worldwide.

Yola became a Google Apps customer as soon as it was formed more than 3 years ago. Today, with a distributed workforce of over 60 people globally, Yola is using Google Apps for everything from email to document collaboration resulting in tremendous savings and increased productivity.

According to Vinny, “The founders of Yola knew the company’s potential and wanted a scalable and cost effective solution that could grow with their business. Google Apps made it easy to be up and running within minutes and was a fast and low-maintenance solution that fit the needs of a growing company.”

Vinny and his team at Yola are among millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses that are having a positive impact on our economy; this week we celebrated their contributions. In addition to Vinny, we selected a few other organizations, shared their stories, and showcased ways that they take advantage of Google Apps. Now it’s your turn.

Learn how to share your story by visiting the AdWords Blog where you can find tools that teams at Google created to help small businesses succeed. Included are steps on how to create a “Search Story” that walks through your journey as a small business, then share it with us and the world. We’re looking forward to seeing what you create!

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Editor's Note:This is the fourth post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted small businesses (Revenue Spark and Smart Furniture) that have adopted Google Apps and tips for using Gmail at work. Today, we’ll look at how Google Docs is helping a small business manage its extensive project portfolio and internal operations.

Free Range Studios is a creative agency that has helped hundreds of progressive organizations communicate their messages around social change. If you ask the team, divided between offices in Washington, D.C. and Berkeley, California, Free Range is “Creativity with a Conscience.” This applies to the types of stories they tell and how they tell them, whether it’s through an eco-friendly print ad or a web movie.

At any given time, Free Range is managing projects for multiple non-profits and socially responsible companies. For a small business to create at this scale, collaboration is key. Google Docs is helping Free Range be more nimble, work more efficiently, and remove location barriers.

Free Range switched to Google Apps in 2007; at about the same time, they began to change their approach to staffing projects from office-based to project-based. A single project can now have contributors from either office, in addition to freelancers or clients who can potentially be located anywhere. With real-time collaboration in Google Docs, all these groups can contribute to an idea as though they’re working side-by-side.

Google Docs is also improving office efficiency. Pete Hamm, Operations Manager, decided to use online forms, created in Google Spreadsheets, to manage tedious tasks that would otherwise take valuable time away from projects. For example, when submitting vacation requests, employees can now fill out a form that automatically populates into a spreadsheet where Pete can take action immediately.

According to Pete Hamm, “Google Docs makes spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing an afterthought - which is what good business tools are supposed to do. Just like email and smart phones, Google Docs facilitates collaboration, instead of hindering it, allowing us to focus on our mission.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Editor's note: This is the third post in a series to celebrate National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted two businesses (Revenue Spark and Smart Furniture) that have adopted Google Apps to help run IT more efficiently. We’ll now turn to ways that individual tools within the Google Apps suite are being used by small businesses everywhere.

Many businesses that use Gmail tell us it has fundamentally changed the way they manage email and communicate on a daily basis. They’re not alone ‒ since Gmail launched 6 years ago, it has become one of the most popular email applications in the world. However, we find that even avid Gmail users may not know about all the rich features and functionality that can help them work smarter.

To get every business up to speed, we posted some tips on today’s Gmail Blog for getting the most out of Gmail at work. Take a look, try them out, and feel free to share them with your colleagues.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Editor's Note: This is the second post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Our first post highlighted an entrepreneur who has founded two companies and is a strong believer in the power of Google Apps. Today we’ll meet another entrepreneur that is an avid supporter of the benefits of cloud computing.

Steve Messere is an entrepreneur and businessman who has added to the growing count of small businesses that are helping move America forward. Aside from running his own company, Steve is actively involved in promoting "sustainable capitalism" as a new form of profit-seeking business, combining traditional shareholder value with a “cradle-to-cradle” approach to environment impact, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

When Steve founded Revenue Spark – a business that helps green technology companies to take their product to market – he already saw the value of cloud computing. He knew that it was the technology needed to propel his own business forward, and adopted Google Apps from the onset.

For Steve, “anytime, anywhere” access is critical, and this requires business tools that are platform independent and available through a browser on either laptop or mobile devices. With Google Apps, Steve and his employees can be productive no matter where they are – at home, on the road, or in the office.

Steve’s plan is to use cloud-based tools like Google Apps to achieve a virtual status – one that allows him to recruit talent from across the country and grow faster than he could if he had to acquire physical space in the real world. He’s already off and running.

Revenue Spark is adding clients and new employees around the US and is on its first tour of Europe, looking to bring clients online with its service. Steve is also planning to open an office in New Zealand that will rely entirely on cloud computing as a vital connection to other Revenue Spark teams and shared information tools.

In Steve’s words, "Cloud computing not only makes it possible for Revenue Spark to enable our teams to be the 'best at their best' but it fits our company's overall global mission of being a leader in sustainable business practices."

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

This week we’re joining others throughout the country to celebrate National Small Business Week, declared by the President of the United States to recognize the impact of small businesses on America’s economic well-being.

We hear great stories every day about how Google Apps is helping small businesses compete and grow. So, to honor the millions of small businesses across America, we’re kicking off a week-long blog series to share their stories. We’ll highlight some of the outstanding entrepreneurs and small businesses that we’ve worked with over the past few years, how Google Apps has helped them grow, and examples of ways small businesses are using tools in the Google Apps suite.

To start, we’d like to share a story showcasing Stephen Culp, Founder and Chairman of Smart Furniture and CEO of Delegator. Read Stephen's post on the Official Google Blog to see how his business is using Google Apps – and stay tuned for more small business news throughout the week.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

As we announced in February, next week we’ll be traveling to Washington D.C. to participate in America’s Small Business Summit, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. On Tuesday, May 18, Google is hosting a breakout session where we’ll continue the discussion we kicked off this week on the ChamberPost blog. We'll also talk about the technology trends that are impacting today’s small business.

Joining us will be a panel of Google Apps customers, including one Google Apps Authorized Reseller, who will share their experiences about how they’ve put the power of the web to work for their business. You’ll hear directly from:

• Stephen Culp, Founder and Chairman, Smart Furniture
• Pete Hamm, Operations Manager, Free Range Studios
• Jim McNelis, Principal, Dito
• Steve Messere, Founder and CEO, Revenue Spark

The full Summit agenda is packed with valuable perspectives and interesting discussion topics to help support your business. We hope you’ll join us – and if you do, please stop by our booth and say hello.

P.S. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is offering a special one-day rate to attend the event. Check it out.

Posted by Shaluinn Fullove, Google Apps team

Small business owners often ask us how Google Apps can help improve the way they work. We'll be sharing some answers in May when we join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at this year's America's Small Business Summit.

Every day, thousands of businesses of all sizes sign up for Google Apps to help save money, reduce IT hassles, and improve collaboration. For small business owners, Google Apps provides a familiar set of easy-to-use Google business applications with minimal setup and maintenance costs, so that you can stay focused on more strategic elements of running your business.

We hope that you'll join us at this upcoming summit, and, in the meantime, we invite you to take a look at how a few small businesses are using Google Apps today to help improve they way they work.



Posted by Shaluinn Fullove, Google Apps team

As we approach the holidays, retailers are gearing up for the seasonal shopping traffic. While they can't, of course, control overall consumer spending, they can control the experience they provide to consumers – both in their brick-and-mortar stores and online.

To help accomplish this, today we're announcing a new product, Google Commerce Search, to power e-commerce and search for online stores.

In the online shopping world, search quality is a big factor in converting browsers to buyers, and in keeping customers happy. In fact, 43% of visitors to online retail sites say the very first thing they do is type the product name or product category into the search box (MarketingSherpa).

While most of the top retailers have a search engine on their websites, the speed and accuracy of search results can make a real difference in visitor engagement and conversion rates. Visitors spend an average of only 8 seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website (MarketingSherpa), so fast, accurate results can make a big difference in conversion.

That's why we're prioritizing speed and search quality for online stores with Google Commerce Search (GCS). GCS is a hosted, cloud-based offering that brings the relevancy, speed, and Google ease-of-use to e-commerce sites. Learn more here:

GCS also has a bunch of user-friendly features that make shopping on online stores easier, and search results more refined and accurate. Some of those features are:

• speed – GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.

• Google quality and ranking – GCS analyzes every item in the data feed using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.

• parametric search and sorting – GCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.

• product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.

• spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google search engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.

• fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.

The hosted factor is a key feature in making GCS easy for administrators to use. Because there's no hardware (or software, servers, operating systems, cables, or any other equipment), admins can upload product information to Google Merchant Center and provide a few extra customization parameters – and Google Commerce Search utilizes that product feed to power their website store search.

Retailers can use the same feed to submit their products for indexing in Google Product Search as well, cutting down on time and tech costs.

With GCS, any e-commerce website can provide visitors with an improved shopping experience. That improvement can drive higher visitor-to-buyer conversion rates. While the conversion rates of most retailers is around 3% (Forrester), the best-performing sites have been able to achieve much higher conversion rates – even reaching double digits. For the top online retailers, improving the conversion rate from 3% to even 4% might actually mean improving online sales by 33% – a jump that can represent millions of extra dollars each month.

GCS frees online stores to do what they do best – create the product and promotional mix that their visitors need – and leaves Google to do what we do best: search. This helps retailers improve conversions and drive the sales that matter this holiday season – and, in fact, all year 'round.

Learn more about GCS at google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop and Eric Larson, Google enterprise search team

Editor's Note: Taylor McKnight is a co-founder of SCHED*, a web based scheduling and social networking application for conferences and festivals. He is currently a partner at The Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator and discovery tool for music fans and has worked extensively as a web developer at Gawker Media and The University of Florida. Taylor built SCHED* using Google Docs, part of the Google Apps suite of messaging and collaboration apps available in Education, Standard and Premier Editions.

We're sharing Taylor's story as an example of how Google Apps speeds innovation and makes it easy for good ideas to turn into real businesses, quickly, reliably, and without the need for investment in IT infrastructure.

I'm a rabid music fan, and friends often ask me for recommendations when it comes to festivals, bands, and other music-related events. SCHED* was born out of a desire to keep track of my favorite events.

SCHED* is a simple, social scheduling app that Chirag Mehta and I launched as an unofficial SXSW 2008 Schedule and which spread like wildfire among attendees. There were more than 4,000 bands, panels, films and parties going on during that week and I was obsessed with not missing a thing. I had grown weary of manually building a schedule of recommendations for friends and wanted to build an easy way that anybody could create and publicize a schedule themselves.

We soon expanded to support all kinds of events and new clients including music festivals like Lollapalooza, tech conferences like The Next Web, and political conventions like the UK Labour Conference. We've now handled 80+ new events.

We ran the original version of SCHED* at SXSW 2008 as a makeshift solution using an exported Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. Once we began working with clients, we began looking for a more streamlined solution – ideally, an online spreadsheet that they could update on-the-go and didn't require programming knowledge. Google Apps Premier Edition provided the answer.

Google Docs spreadsheets, included in Google Apps, was the clear front runner because a majority of conference organizers already had Google accounts and were familiar with the interface. Additionally, the API made it easy for organizers to retrieve data from their spreadsheets. Here's what it looks like when it's up and running:

The idea of driving our entire admin interface from within a Google spreadsheet was exciting. Little to no learning curve, no server overhead, and Google's redundancy made this decision a big payoff. After setting up a simple data template, we used the Google Docs API to give the organizers a way to update the live site. In a single day it was integrated so that a simple click of a button would trigger an XML export of the Google Docs spreadsheet to our servers, instantly updating both our database and the live schedule that users would see.

The benefits of creatively using a Google Docs spreadsheet as a database entry point also gave us additional features we didn't have to build.

Document sharing was an easy way to provide access to all those involved as well as troubleshoot any difficulties live with the built in chat room. If a client needed help with formatting or suggestions for their event types we could give them live suggestions within the spreadsheet. Revision history gave us instant rollback in case there were any accidental overwrites, which are bound to happen.

Having these support features and safety nets built in to Google Docs spreadsheets let us spend more time improving the product itself (like an iPhone compatible version!) instead of reinventing the wheel.

We also use the Google Talk chatback badges embedded into every page of our new marketing site to provide always-on, live chat access to our team. We're excited to give our current and potential clients a new, simple way of communicating with us (even without logging into anything!).

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Have a story to share about how you use Google Apps? Tell us here and we may follow up with you.

Providers of cloud computing services like Google are equipped to protect millions of users' data every day – it's core to how we run our business. Our users enjoy our economies of scale at minimal expense. We also employ some of the world's best security experts to help to make sure that your data stays safe.


On October 1, join us for a live webcast with some of our top security experts who are on the front lines of fighting spam, malware, and phishing for Google Apps users, designing identity management systems for hosted web apps, and monitoring the Google network for potential threats. Register for this live webcast, “How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It,” to learn about security in the cloud and get your questions answered by members of Google's Security team. Participants include:

Eran Feigenbaum – As the Director of Security for Google Apps, Eran Feigenbaum defines and implements security strategy for Google's suite of solutions for enterprises. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Eran was the US Chief Information Security Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

John Flynn – John “Four” Flynn has an extensive background in network monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response. John currently leads Google's Security Monitoring program and is a founder of Google's Security Metrics group.

Bradley Taylor – Gmail's “Spam Czar,” Brad Taylor leads Gmail's technical anti-spam, anti-abuse, and email delivery engineering efforts. Brad has played a key role in the development of Gmail's spam filter since Gmail launched in April, 2004.

Eric Sachs – Eric Sachs has over 15 years of experience with user identity and security for hosted web applications. During his years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services including Google Accounts, Google Apps, orkut, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems.

While circumstances may vary, most IT departments face similar security challenges. Find out more from the people who confront these issues every day here at Google.

Join us for our live webcast to learn about the people, best practices, and technologies that we have in place to minimize security threats.

How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It
Thursday, October 1, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.