Showing posts with label google applications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google applications. Show all posts

Friday, January 7, 2011

Google Apps highlights – 1/7/2011

This is part of a usual series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label Google Apps highlights and pledge to the series.

http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com/
It’s a new year, and we have new reasons to rejoice what’s possible with Google Apps. Since our last update, we’ve made it easier to track spreadsheet revisions and work with videos in Google Docs, additional two new security features for organizations using Gmail and introduced new capabilities to make migrate to Google Apps even easier.

http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com/
Revision history for spreadsheets

A few months ago we added better review history tools for documents in Google Docs, and we just added a similar alteration history tool for spreadsheets. Spreadsheet changes made by each co-author are marked by a different color, and you can easily see all of the changes made to your spreadsheet cell-by-cell.


http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com/
Video player in the document list

Google Docs lets groups work together concurrently on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, but you can also use it to upload and share a wide range of file types. Previously, if you uploaded and shared a video file, people you shared with could only download the file. Yesterday we released an update which lets you play many videos right from Google Docs, no file download necessary.

A safer email environment for customers

Organizations using Google Apps typically provide unobstructed email access to their users, but some organizations—like K-12 schools—want to stop outsiders from interacting with a subset of their users over email. On Tuesday, we released a feature enabling an email walled garden, so organizations can meet this requirement. K-12 schools can help defend youngsters, and other types of organizations can provide incomplete email accounts to select employees, like contractors.

DKIM email authentication for improved email delivery

Yesterday we made it probable for customers to easily validate their outgoing email with DKIM digital signatures. DKIM allows many getting email systems to verify whether an incoming message truly originates from the domain in the message sent from field. Spam filters can then use the standing of the sender’s domain to help separate good mail from spam. For customers, using DKIM verification means their outgoing mail is less likely to get caught up in their recipients’ spam filters.


Chrome browser for organizations

Google Chrome is built for speed, security and the ability to run the most complicated web-based applications. Until recently, it was tough for businesses to deploy Chrome as a successor or alternative to traditional browsers, but last month we added capabilities to Chrome so IT administrators can professionally deploy and manage Chrome across their organizations. We’ve also made it likely for businesses to centrally deploy Chrome Frame to get better performance of Internet Explorer.



Improved tools for moving existing data to Google Apps

Customers are already moving data from legacy systems to Google Apps at an astonishing rate, and we’ve just made improvements to our data migration tools. Whether you’re touching from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes or other IMAP-based email systems, it’s now even easier to move email, calendar and contacts data into Google’s cloud.

Who’s gone Google?

Tens of thousands of businesses, schools and other organization took advantage of the holiday break to move over to Google Apps. Some of the notable additions include Compositites One, Broadway Maylan and BI-LO. We also heard some great stories from Traffic Konzept + Film GmbH a team of explorers and filmmakers on a first-ever journey to sail both North Pole passages in a single season. You can learn more about their exploit and how they use Google Apps here:

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Picasa Web Albums Wish List

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unjustly abandoned by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the main flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online addition of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums innate Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features since they were obtainable in Picasa. Instead of focusing on civilizing the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, extra new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat comparable to Microsoft's Office Live, an online addition of a popular software, which is astonishing, allowing for that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com/
If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll see that Google recommends to install Picasa. That's because you can only upload up to 5 photos at a time using the web app (unless you're using Internet Explorer: Google urbanized an ActiveX control for uploading photos).
Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that with no installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you require to use Picasa or Picnik, a unhurried Flash image editor. It would be much more helpful to have some basic editing options within Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly touch up your photos.

Andrew Maxwell and François Beaufort shaped a long wish list for Picasa Web Albums (categorization albums by name, sub-albums, upload by drag and drop, multiple sign-in, offline mode) and many of their issues can be easily address by storing photos in Google Docs and transform Picasa Web Albums into a Google Docs app. This way, you'll use a single file storage space service, uploading and downloading multiple photos will be much easier, photos could be communal privately without revealing all the photos from an album, you might add photos to multiple folders and even create subfolders. Another advantage is that you'll be able to use a syncing software for all your files if Google decides to discharge a software like Dropbox or Windows Live Mesh.