Googlified

A little bit behind on this one, but for those who haven’t noticed yet, Google Docs‘ document editor now has a new menu, bridging the gap between the online word processor and Microsoft Word, one little step at a time.

The above diagram from Google Blogoscoped shows that the menu of the document editor’s menu over time, since the time of Writely (before relaunching as Google Docs). As you can see, it ran a whole circle for one and a half years and pretty much back to where it started, except that it changed from yellow-green/olive to blue.

Also, you can now apply color to the name of your folders, like in Google Calendar and Gmail, and transfer ownership of documents with people that have the same domain in the email address (i.e. a@example.com can transfer document to b@example.com but cannot transfer to c@domain.com).

UPDATE: Forgot to add that Google Docs is now available in 48 languages.

Sixteen months of eager waiting, Google finally relaunched JotSpot today as Google Sites. The new service is part of Google Apps, but unlike other services included in Google Apps, Google Sites is not available as a separate application for non-Apps users (yet).

After a few minutes of playing with Google Sites, I found it quite promising (so far). The setup progress for a new site is very simple, just enter the site name, choose who can edit & view the site, and pick one of the 20 available themes. Of course, you will need to enable the service in Google Apps before this. Just go to the Dashboard, click on Add more services, and there you can enable it.

Editing pages for the sites is pretty straight forward, takes place in an advanced WYSIWYG editor. You can include various multimedia content in the sites’ pages, including Google Calendar, Picasa Web slideshows, Google/YouTube videos, and even iGoogle gadgets.

Each Google Sites account receives “10GB of storage in Google Sites” with “an additional 500MB for each user account” of the Premier and Education editions.

Nostalgia strikes! It reminds me the old days of creating websites on GeoCities. *Sigh*

Jeff Fisher of the Google Data APIs Team released a sample application (for Windows users) to manage your documents on Google Docs. You can use the DocList Uploader to upload multiple documents at once, as well as deleting documents.

Since this application is used to demonstrate the functionalities of the Documents List Data API, there’s an article on Google Code “detailing the construction of the sample.”

A reader of this blog sent in an email informing me that he’s seeing new version of Gmail in his Google Apps account.

I’m using Google Apps and this afternoon noticed that Gmail 2.0 has arrived. Fast indexing of emails, new contacts and labels. Working like a charm!

Just checked my Google Apps account for this domain and it’s still using the older version of Gmail. I guess Google is slowly rolling out this to Google Apps users. Make sure to check the “Next generation” option in Domain settings (in the domain’s control panel) if you want these new features earlier.

[thanks Alex.]

Andrew Miller of Your Search Advisor recently attended a Google Apps presentation where Googler Scott Johnston (formerly works at JotSpot) revealed that Google Page Creator will be replaced by JotSpot applications, and rename to Google Sites.

Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Scott also confirmed that Google will release offline versions of many Google’s services, including Google Docs, Gmail and Google Calendar, with the help of Google Gears.

I am just afraid that by “sometime in 2008″ they meant “the week before the end of 2008″. Remember the case with Google Presentation, do you? :)

[via TechCrunch]

Google today announced that they have added Postini’s (the company that they acquired few months ago) email security technology and compliance services to Google Apps’ Premier Edition. The newly added features allows Apps users to:

• Customize spam and virus filtering “for the nature of the business”
• Centrally manage all outbound content policy (aka. internal censorship)
• Administrators can to look into all in/outbound emails of the organization(s)
• Restore messages inadvertently deleted in the last 90 days

Also, the email storage will increase from 10GB to 25GB for all users using the Premier Edition. (Don’t forget, you can upgrade your Gmail account to 250GB for $500/year) Google offers a 30-day free trial for the service, if you are interested, you can sign up here.

I won’t feel comfortable if my boss (if I have one, that is) looks through my emails, not even the corporate ones. Yuck!

I am not quite sure what exactly is the Google Dogfood, are they referring to the Google Apps or an internal program. Anyone?

As for the launch date in the picture, the closest would be Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which launched on October 11th, 2006.

[photo by the friendly Andrew Hitchcock, used under a CC-license]

The last post about JotSpot on this blog was more than three months ago (the funny thing is that the post titled: JotSpot Coming Soon), and we haven’t heard anything interesting from them until now: ZDNet blog Between the Lines reports that JotSpot joining Google Apps revolution.

Google is adding JotSpot, which the company acquired in October 2006, to the Google Apps, according to Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise.

That makes sense…

[via InsideGoogle]

Google today rolled out more than 30 new features and upgrades to Google Apps. One of these new features, email migration tools (Premier edition only), allows users to “easily make the transition to Google Apps services without leaving any of their valuable email data behind” by copying all emails from their old IMAP server to Google Apps. The migration wizard currently supports Exchange 2003, Cyrus, Courier, and Dovecot, but you shall see more soon.

Another new feature worth mentioning is Shared address book, which “includes all the users on your organization’s Google Apps domain.”

None of these new features seem to be working on my standard edition. Weird…

UPDATE: Now on the Official Google Blog.

Last Friday, Google celebrated PCWorld naming Google Apps Premier Edition as the No.1 of the 100 Best Product of 2007.

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.

The cake looks good but what’s with the train?

Google Apps Premier Edition was named the No.1 product of the year by PC World. Google Apps’ Product Marketing Manager Jeremy Milo said on the Official Google Blog that “more than 100,000 organizations large and small” are using “Google Apps“.

I bet majority of them are using the free version. :)

Other Google properties on the list are Gmail (31), YouTube (34), Picasa (36) and Google Maps for Mobile (53).