The Impact of Google Apps for Government

Google released a new edition of Google Apps designed specifically with security measures to handle the policy and data needs of the public sector. Google Apps for Government offers the first cloud computing applications suite accredited by the U.S. Government and certified by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) delivering confidence to all government departments, agencies and organizations looking to migrate to the cloud.

This marks a monumental day not only for Google Apps as a platform, but for all of cloud computing. We believe this accomplishment is going to pave the way for other cloud providers to bring to market similar offerings. From our experience working with various government customers, we know how demanding their security and data requirements can be once they decide on Google Apps implementation. Therefore, we feel if platforms like Google Apps become well adopted by government, all other organizations will feel even more confident about the security and validity of the cloud at large.

SADA Systems has been assisting various levels of government and public education customers in Google Apps migration and the Google Apps for Government announcement will certainly foster confidence and interest in cloud technology migration.

Google Apps: Improvements to recurring events and Tasks in Google Calendar

You now have the ability to change locations, add attendees, and change event descriptions without having the meeting break out of the series of recurring events.

Tasks in Calendar is now available in 38 languages.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
Tasks: All languages supported by Google Calendar except Hebrew/Arabic

How to access what's new:
- In Calendar when modifying an event, when you change the time, title, description, location, or attendees of an individual meeting in a series, that meeting now remains part of the series.
- If you change the title, description, location, or attendees of a series of events, these changes will be applied to all events in the series, including those that have overridden fields. However, Calendar will intelligently keep track of what fields you override, and not change those fields e.g. if you change the location of one particular event instance in the series, then later modify the location for the entire series and give it a new title, the one particular event will be updated with the new title but the location will remain at what you had overridden.
- Changing the time or frequency of any series still resets all information in the series, even those that have been manually overridden.
- If you make any changes to a series and apply to "All Following", it will reset all information in all future meetings, and the future meetings will be become a new distinct series. This will override any fields that you may have manually overridden.

For more information:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar

For more information on getting started with Google Apps, please click here or call 866-997-0000, option 3.

Google Apps: Increased upload limit for Google Video

You can now upload larger videos to Google Video. The individual video upload limit has been increased from 1GB to 16GB if you have Google Gears installed.

Google Apps Editions supported:
Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Video

How to access what's new:
- Install Google Gears from http://gears.google.com/.
- Upload a video as normal in Google Video by clicking on the Upload tab.

For more information:
Google Video Overview

MORE Great New Features in Google Apps!

If you get a message in your Gmail inbox from your cousin in Germany, a business associate in Mexico or a pen pal in Japan and it's written in their native language, the Labs folks at Google have another innovation for you. Using Google Translate technology, Gmail will offer to translate the message from the original language to your own default language (or any other language you choose).

To enable this feature, within Gmail click on Gmail Labs (either the tab or the green beaker icon) and click "enable" under Translation. When Gmail detects one of your messages is in a language other than your default language, you'll see a header at the top of the message. Click the link that says Translate message to.... Your message will be translated inline (no need to open a new tab or window).

In other Apps related news, Google has made some big updates to Google Sites including allowing for hierarchical navigation of your Site's pages, refreshing the edit menu to be more consistent with Google Docs and switched the site settings area to vertical navigation to prepare for upcoming features, one of which, according to Jens Alfke of Google, is Google AdSense integration.

(Hat tip to Google Operating System  and The Official Google Apps Blog )

Google Calendar Adds Tasks!

Google innovation continues to add more features to Google Apps, the premier software as a service based suite of messaging and collaboration applications that offers organizations powerful productivity tools.

Google has recently added tasks to Google Calendar, after previously introducing the function as a Gmail Labs  feature. Tasks will appear in the Tasks Gadget on the right side of your calendar grid.  Using this feature, you can now assign due dates to your tasks that will appear on the "All Day" event section of Google Calendar.

You can create tasks either by clicking on an empty space in the "All Day" section or in Month view and then choose the task option.  You can manage your tasks in the Tasks Gadget on the right side of your calendar.  To mark a task as complete from within Calendar click on the checkbox next to the task.  For more instructions on using tasks please click here.

Whether your business is moving everything to the cloud, just wants an affordable email solution or struggles to give employees access to critical information, Google Apps will help you stretch resources and work smarter. SADA has a demonstrated track record and competency in the implementation and customization of Google Apps. Give us a call today at 866.997.0000 or visit us at http://www.sadasystems.com/services-and-solutions/google-apps.

New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail

From the Official Gmail Blog:

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer

I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing.

With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:


Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.


You can click on a search result and it'll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it's what you're looking for. Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.

What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:

• If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
• If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
• If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
• You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you're not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you're composing (that's ⌘ + g for Mac users).

Like all things in Gmail Labs, we're going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think.

Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we've been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who've been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on "Navbar drag and drop" in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it's easy to get to.

Sheet protection in Google Docs spreadsheets

You can now control who can edit individual sheets in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
To protect a specific sheet, select the sheet and click the down arrow next to the sheet's name, and select the 'Protect sheet' option. Next, select who is allowed to edit the sheet from the 'Protect sheet' preferences box.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/04/sheet-protection-gives-you-finer.html