Posted by Bob Purvy & Robert Escorcio, Google Engineers

From the very beginning, we've recognized that, in order for customers to get the most out of Google Apps, they will want to enjoy the Apps but not rip out their infrastructure to do so. As a result, we've tried to have open APIs to our applications and to Google Apps administration. One key area is corporate directories, and most companies already manage their users through their LDAP or equivalent directory service.

To give customers a jump start in migrating and synchronizing users from their LDAP directory, we've created an LDAP synchronization tool that we are releasing on code.google.com. However, while many companies have an LDAP directory, they often use it in different ways. Because of this, we've decided to release this into open source, so many developers can improve and adapt the tool to their own needs. The tool is written in Python, and uses the Google Apps User Provisioning API to create, delete, and suspend users.

Best of all, we eat our own dogfood, and we've used this tool here at Google to synchronize with our own LDAP directory. We run our own business on Google Apps, and we want other companies to benefit from this effort.

We hope to see a thousands flowers bloom, and look forward to other developers adding to and morphing the tool for their own needs. You can find the project at: http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-for-your-domain-ldap-sync/

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager for Enterprise Search

In our nearly six years in enterprise search, we’ve always looked to develop offerings that would help businesses of all sizes find and share the right information with their employees, customers and target audiences when they needed it. Today, we’re building on this heritage by announcing our newest solution for enterprise public website search: Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE).

CSBE builds on the Google Custom Search Engine -- a hosted search solution introduced last October that allows organizations to create a website search engine and search results that are tailored to their point of view. Since our launch, businesses have asked for increased flexibility and support. We're addressing these needs with CSBE. Businesses that want further control over results presentation and integration with their website can obtain results through XML. Businesses now have the option to turn off ads and can have further control over branding. In addition, CSBE provides options for email and phone support. You can sign up for CSBE starting at $100 per year for searching up to 5,000 pages.

We think this addition to our enterprise suite of search tools will be just the thing for the millions of businesses lacking the technical resources to set up search for their websites. We also expect Business Edition to offer a much-needed boost to site owners whose entire company depends on their ability to guide visitors to the right information about their company and its offerings as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here's how to obtain CSBE for your business.

Posted by Jens Scheffler, Software Engineer, Google Apps Team

Since we first launched it in August 2006, Google Apps has become one of our most flexible offerings. It's helping to meet the needs of family domains, businesses of all sizes, Internet Service Providers and universities. Starting today, we're extending the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered nonprofits.

We're excited about this development not only because nonprofits, like universities, can benefit from access to powerful technology tools that don't strain overburdened budgets, but because we believe our technologies should promote as much of a positive impact in the non-commercial world as we hope they do for commercial enterprises.

In addition to the hosted suite of communication and collaboration tools such as email, calendaring, and online document-sharing -- available for free through Google Apps Standard Edition -- nonprofits can now access additional product and support offerings available to universities at no additional cost, including:

• Email migration tools to help transfer existing inboxes to Google Apps
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues
• Extensibility APIs to integrate with existing IT systems

Many nonprofits including the Nonprofit Technology Network, Mercy Corps, Idealist.org, and the East Bay Community Recovery Project have already moved their IT infrastructure over to Google Apps with positive results. Ltech Consulting, one of Google's Enterprise Professionals, has even begun offering discounted Google Apps services to nonprofit groups.

We couldn't be happier about enabling a wide range of nonprofits to carry out their incredibly important work. To find out more or sign up, visit www.google.com/a/npo.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Product Manager, Google Apps

Since launching Google Apps last August, companies of all sizes have experienced the benefits of delivering simple, useful hosted applications to their employees. However, larger organizations are frequently forced to choose between taking advantage of the latest innovations that will make employees more productive and ensuring security and corporate compliance. As noted on the Official Google Blog, we're excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Postini, a company that offers hosted security and compliance solutions for email, IM, and other web-based communications. Postini already serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users and was one of our first Google Enterprise Partners for Google Apps.

Postini's offerings are a natural complement to our technology, and we are excited about giving businesses the opportunity to make the leap to hosted applications, such as Google Apps, more quickly. The acquisition of Postini comes on the heels of our recent release of email migration tools, which have already been used to migrate millions of email messages from legacy systems over to Google Apps. And it's part of our ongoing commitment to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes with Google Apps.

For organizations that are not yet ready to jump full force into hosted applications, Postini's proven messaging security and corporate compliance management solutions are a great place to start. You can request a demo or sign up for a test drive right now.

We hope that by providing a more complete communication and messaging solution, even more users will have the chance to experience the joy of hosted applications like Google Apps.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

I continue to be amazed at the pace of innovation and interest around gadgets in general, and Google Gadgets in particular. With thousands of Google Gadgets in the directory and the top gadgets getting tens of millions of pageviews per week, something is clearly working :)

So much so that yesterday we announced Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program designed to fund 3rd party gadget developers. This is a great way to help developers pursue the growing opportunities around gadgets.

Speaking of opportunity, to date, the majority of gadget development has focused on consumer or individual productivity use cases. We're seeing increasing interest in gadgets that access password protected information, often pulled from line of business applications behind a firewall.

Interest here is particularly strong amongst Google Apps users, since the Google Apps Start Page effectively gives organizations iGoogle on their own password protected domain.

For example, we're showcasing some of these "enterprise" gadgets in the Start Page category of the Enterprise Solutions Gallery. Entries include Appirio's gadgets for Salesforce.com and LimitNone's gadgets for corporate directories or internal RSS feeds.

If you're interested in developing gadgets, check out the gadget developer pages.

If you'd prefer to have someone create an enterprise gadget for you, there's a growing list of 3rd parties specializing in this type of development in the professional services category of the Enterprise Solutions Gallery.

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Channel Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

This month, we passed the 9,000 mark for enterprise buyers of the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini. That's a great start, but we want to reach out even farther, which is why we're embarking on a partnership with Ingram Micro. One of the largest global distributors of technology products in the world, Ingram has extensive reseller relationships in Europe, Asia and Latin America that will help us deliver the power of search behind the firewall to businesses of all sizes, more efficiently and at a larger scale than we could on our own.

In addition to having access to a rich network of more than 165,000 retailers and resellers worldwide, Ingram possesses core strengths in sales, reseller credit, marketing, technical support and logistics. And it has strong penetration into the small-to-medium business (SMB) and Government and Education (Gov/Ed) channels that complement our goal to offer great search technology to even more enterprise users, no matter their size, segment or location.

Dave Girouard, our VP and General Manager for Google Enterprise, puts it this way: “This relationship with Ingram Micro marks an important milestone in the evolution of Google’s enterprise search business, giving customers around the world better access to our products and support. With the global reach and efficient distribution of Ingram Micro, many more customers will be able to gain the benefits of Google search to their business.”

Both the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance are available immediately to qualified Ingram Micro solution providers in the U.S.; there are plans for a phased rollout in other regions through 2007. To find out how to obtain a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance, contact us here or here.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

As Vikaram noted on the Official Google Blog, today was a big day for Google Apps. We introduced some great new features. Email migration makes it easy to import your email from your company's existing IMAP email servers, and the shared address book makes it simple to email and share documents with people on in your organization.

Also, if you're still trying to convince your coworkers of the benefits of Google Apps, or maybe just to explain Google Apps to your mom, share this video with them.

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

The first time people learn about the Google Search Appliance, they often remark, ‘I didn’t know Google makes hardware.’ Actually, to power the millions of searches and other products, Google builds and deploys LOTS of servers in datacenters all over the world.

With the Google Search Appliance, one of the most difficult engineering challenges was to take Google's excellent web search and make it work well in the Enterprise. Specifically, the Google Search Appliance integrates with a wide variety of security systems, content repositories and other enterprise applications. Doing this in a relatively small footprint to make it easier for customers to deploy is nothing short of amazing. The reason we chose the appliance route is that was the only way we could give our customers a true plug-and-play experience. Customers routinely tell us that they setup the Google Search Appliance or Google Mini in a matter of hours – which stands in stark contrast to more complex enterprise search systems.

Thousands and thousands of happy customers later, the market has spoken – enterprise search is an important business challenge and customers worldwide are increasing their investment in search.

Recently, we started working with Dell to manufacture the Google Search Appliance. This partnership enables us to focus more on the software side – which is our real value add. Additionally, Dell’s international reach is helping us make the Google Search Appliance available faster in markets around the globe.

So does this mean the popular (and playful) yellow appliance is going to be replaced by a more buttoned-down corporate server? As you can see in the ad below that Dell is running to showcase our partnership, the familiar yellow box was one of many customizations to the manufacturing process that insures that the Google Search Appliance will continue to be the brightest box in the data center!

Posted by Scott McMullan, Enterprise Partner Team

Phil Wainewright's recent How SaaS changes the SI universe post highlights some important points about the impact Software as a Service is having on professional services.

In interviews with Appirio and Bluewolf, two SI's that are both Google Enterprise Professional partners as well as Salesforce.com partners, he expands on some fundamental differences in project delivery and scope:

"This is typically a business with 30-60 day projects and the ability to show things to customers as they’re being developed, which is not the kind of engagement the traditional SIs are used to."

He goes on to reference Bluewolf's CEO Eric Berridge:

"Berridge said that the focus is very much on best practice business processes and getting close to users in agile development-style engagements where they can see the applications taking shape and see the effect of changes as they happen."

This agile, iterative model of delivery professional services exactly mirrors what customers love about the on-demand model. Namely predictable costs and timelines, transparency because it's easy to "take the taste test", and continual improvements based on direct feedback to the vendor. This is exactly in line with what I saw at JotSpot, and is indeed what we're seeing around Google Apps.

Disruptive? Yes. But I'm personally not counting out the big SI's in this transition.

The upside for SI's of all sizes is large:

1. More intimate interaction with the customer
   
2. More money to allocate to more interesting, higher-value projects
   
3. Predictable costs and an agile approach reduce risk to encourage even more experimentation and innovation
   

One slice of the pie shrinks, while the other grows. The only question is how fast folks want to start investing in the new model.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager



...and eat it too. On Friday at our company-wide TGIF, we celebrated PC World naming Google Apps Premier Edition #1 on their list of The 100 Best Products of 2007. Google Apps beat out the Nintendo Wii, Apple TV, and the Slingbox Pro, further reinforcing the convergence between business and consumer technology. Internally, Google Apps is a collaboration between Google enterprise and consumer teams. It's great to see that it's paying off.