Google News Updates

Has your company, school or organization decided to "go Google" - but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more direction on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the choice to go Google can be the easiest part, but Google realized that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where it comes in.

The Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations - large and small - make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, they have developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment professional will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.

Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include inventive examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:

• For enterprises
• For small/medium businesses
• For schools

Recently, they also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. They also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration. These resources help with your move to Google Apps, and they can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within the majority of businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While conventional business technologies give companies the essential safety and controls, they do so at the expense of fast innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this conciliation.

This is one reason why customers are so excited about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade safety and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Google has launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Google has announced the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling each one from the local hiking club to the family next door to generate mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the innovative service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start running their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that Google has tailored for the enterprise since they launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and they are looking forward to bringing more innovation to all the users in the months and years ahead.