Change Google Calendar’s default meeting length and more print options

Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog.)

Today we’re adding two features that make it easier to customize Google Calendar. First, you can now change your default event length from the standard 30 minute slot. If you frequently create 15 minute meetings, for example, you can now make 15 minutes the default length for all your events. This way, you don’t need to click into the event page to change the duration every time.



You can change the default length of your events from the Calendar settings page. Next to the “Default meeting length” option, choose the length you’d like from the drop-down menu on the right. From there, you can also enable “Speedy meetings,” which automatically shortens events that are 30 minutes or longer to allow you to prep for your next meeting or get to your next appointment if you have a packed schedule.



Second, for those of you who still prefer paper and print your calendar, you can now select a specific date range in the print dialog box. Google Calendar will automatically format your printout for the date range you choose.

We hope you find these new customization options useful. Let us know what you think in the Google Calendar Help Forum.

Editors note: These features are currently launching to all Rapid Release Google Apps accounts.

Introducing the people widget

Posted by Zohair Hyder, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog)

Email is just as much about the people you communicate with as it is what you communicate about. We think it can be helpful to view relevant information in context, which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages. The people widget surfaces content from colleagues and friends that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them.




Next to every email message you can now see contextual information about the people in that conversation including recent emails you received from them, shared documents and calendar events. You also have quick access to a variety of ways to communicate with individuals, start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people.


We hope the people widget will improve your Gmail experience and we’re eager for you to try it out.

Directski.com goes Google

Posted by Ronan Hughes, CTO at Directski.com

Editor's Note: Next up, we’d like to welcome Ronan Hughes, Chief Technical Officer at Directski.com, a web based travel company based in Dublin. Directski.com migrated to Google Apps six months ago with the help of Google Apps Authorized Reseller, Baker Security & Networks. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Directski.com have been in business for over ten years, with a mission to make ski holidays more affordable for all. As a 100% web based company, Directski.com doesn’t have glossy brochures, expensive middlemen, high street shops or call centers. We’ve developed a market leading website that has been designed specifically for the sale of ski holidays. We have 30 full time employees and large numbers of seasonal staff that provide ski packages to over 200 European ski destinations.

Effective use of technology has been a key driver and cornerstone of our success. For example, we have used open source products to provide us with scalable, flexible and secure IT systems that have allowed us to grow rapidly but in a cost effective and pragmatic manner. We are always thinking about how technology can simplify and enhance our business processes so that we continually live up to our mission of helping our customers to “ski for less.”

Recently we examined how cloud computing could help us keep this advantage over our competitors. One product that quickly caught our attention was Google Apps and we implemented it across our organisation. The migration to Google Apps was seamless and our employees love it. It’s a huge improvement on our old system and it simply takes care of itself. Our employees find it very intuitive and the combination of Gmail, video sharing, chat and Google Docs allows for great team collaboration across our 5 offices.

Google Apps has numerous advantages for us; it has helped us control our costs, allowing us to focus on the core IT projects that will will add value for our customers, and, in turn, for our business. It is easy to use and offers cutting-edge functionality. Required training is minimal which is very important to us given the large number of seasonal staff we employ. Being a fast-paced, nimble travel company, accessibility is of paramount importance to our team and Google Apps provides this for us.

We’re so impressed with our migration to Google Apps that we’ve put together a quick video to tell you more! We would recommend Google Apps to any faced paced, innovative company.

New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog.)

People get a lot of email these days. On top of personal messages, there are group mailing lists, social network notifications, credit card statements, newsletters you might have signed up for, and promotional email from a shopping site you used once months ago. Gmail’s filters and labels were invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox.

Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”


If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels. If you're picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).

Labs in Gmail are a great testing ground for experimental features, and we hope Smart Labels help you more effortlessly get through your inbox. If you notice a message that was automatically labeled incorrectly and want to help us troubleshoot, you can report miscategorizations from the drop down menu on each message (in doing so, you’ll donate the full message to our engineers so that we can improve the feature).

To get started with Smart Labels:

1. Sign in to Gmail and click 'Settings'.
2. Click the 'Labs' tab and select 'Enable' next to 'Smart Labels’.
3. Click 'Save Changes.'

Please note that Google Apps for Business and Education users will first need their administrators to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel to take advantage of Smart Labels, and other Gmail Labs. For more information on Gmail labs for Google Apps, see the Help Center.

Give it a try and send us feedback on how we can make it work better for you!

Posted by Stanley Chen, Software Engineer

Get in touch faster with new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps

Update: We're excited to announce that the new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps has launched for all Rapid Release users as of 4/7/11. Please continue to give us your feedback in the Comments below.

In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.

In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:

• Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
• View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
• Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
• Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
• Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import

If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.

Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).

Posted by Sean Purcell, Product Manager, Google Contacts

Gaining Altitude: A New Way to Think about Your Inbox

Editor’s note: Continuing our Gaining Altitude series, we’ve invited guest blogger Marsha Egan, CEO of InboxDetox.com and an internationally recognized workplace productivity expert and speaker. Named one of Pennsylvania’s Top 50 Women in Business, her “12 Step Program for Curing Your Email E-ddiction” was featured in several publications and on ABC Nightly News and Fox News.

Overwhelmed by your inbox? There’s never been a better time to shift the way you think about your email -- this week is international "Clean Out Your Inbox Week."

It’s a fact: email isn’t going anywhere. And the number of email messages we receive will only grow. In 2010, there were 294 billion emails sent daily, up almost 50 billion from the previous year. With so many incoming messages, it has become a real challenge to avoid being distracted by the urge to view or work on new emails rather than working on truly important matters.

Despite all of the inbox management tools on the market today, and Google's Priority Inbox is definitely one of the best, many people still have the propensity to leave items in their inboxes as a way to remind them of upcoming tasks or just to keep them handy. This can be self-defeating behavior.

Maintaining a cluttered inbox is a productivity killer
Why? First, that cluttered inbox is a source of stress the minute you open your inbox. It essentially shows you everything you are not going to get done that day. Second, it is a source of distraction, because when people scroll up and down seeking tasks to select, they inevitably open the short easy ones, instead of focusing on the priority items.

Shift the way you view and use your inbox
Picture your email inbox as a Postal Service mailbox. The Postal Service delivers our mail to that mailbox, we pull the mail out of the mailbox, sort through it, throw half of it away, and put the rest in piles, most of which will be dealt with later. What we don't do, is put letters back into the mailbox, to be sorted through again tomorrow. Why not think of our email inboxes the same way?

Differentiate between working and sorting email
When people groan upon the suggestion of cleaning out their inboxes, my guess is that they are thinking they must work on or handle every item in it. When you go into your inbox with the mindset of sorting the messages -- not working them -- the task becomes much more tolerable and doable! It becomes a matter of dragging and dropping messages into folders to be handled later just as you do with your postal mail. In Gmail, you can create two labels: Action A, and Action B. A is for the important items, B for the less important. And once you’ve labeled a message, you can archive it and easily search for it later.

Setting reminders is the key
Every time you drag and drop a message into an action folder, or label it in Gmail, decide at that moment when you will view the item again to work on it. These reminders become a critical part of each day's daily planning, and relieve you from having to scroll up and down either your inbox or your action folder to decide what to work on next.

In Gmail, this is easy. Create a corresponding Task for each item you label, and assign it the date you plan to work it. These tips and more are included among the "12 Steps to Curing Your E-mail E-ddiction" contained in my book, "Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence" (available on our website or on Amazon,) and are further explained on our blog at http://InboxDetox.com/blog.

Why should you want a clean inbox?
Simple. An empty inbox is the result of managing email well. It doesn’t mean that you’ve worked every message, but it does mean that you have sorted every message into a folder or given it a label that allows you to retrieve it when the time comes. By sorting or labeling email to Action A or B and setting a task reminder for when you plan to return to it, you will go a long way towards managing your inbox, rather than having it manage you.

So, here’s to lookin’ at your (empty) inbox!

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

Destination: Dial Tone -- Getting Google Apps to 99.99%

People expect email to be as reliable as their phone's dial tone, and our goal is to deliver that kind of always-on availability with our applications. It's been a couple years since we blogged about the reliability of Gmail, so we thought we'd share some changes to our Google Apps service level agreement (SLA) and some new data.

Strengthening our SLA
We're pleased to make a couple changes that improve our SLA for our customers. Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems. For that reason, we're removing the SLA clause that allows for scheduled downtime. Going forward, all downtime will be counted and applied towards the customer's SLA. We are the first major cloud provider to eliminate maintenance windows from their service level agreement.

We're also amending our SLA so that any intermittent downtime is counted. Previously, a period of less than ten minutes was not included. We believe any instance that causes our users to experience downtime should be avoided -- period.

Gmail: 99.984%
In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984 percent of the time, for both business and consumer users. 99.984 percent translates to seven minutes of downtime per month over the last year. That seven-minute average represents the accumulation of small delays of a few seconds, and most people experienced no issues at all. For those few who were disrupted for a longer period of time, we're very sorry, and Google Apps for Business customers received compensation where appropriate. We're particularly pleased with this level of reliability since it was accomplished without any planned downtime while launching 30 new features and adding tens of millions of active users.

Seven minutes of downtime compares very favorably with on-premises email, which is subject to much higher rates of interruption that hurt employee productivity. The latest research from the Radicati Group found that on-premises email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. In comparison to Radicati's metrics for on-premises email, our calculations suggest that Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average email system, and 46 times more available than Microsoft Exchange®.¹

Fortunately Microsoft Exchange® customers can still benefit from the reliability of Gmail with Google Message Continuity. Comparable data for Microsoft BPOS® is unavailable, though their service notifications show 113 incidents in 2010: 74 unplanned outages, and 33 days with planned downtime.

Email is much more complex than your home phone, so making it as reliable as the dial tone is no mean feat. Despite our best efforts, we will have outages in the future. But we're proud of our track record so far and we're working hard to make it even better. Every time you reach for your phone you expect it to work. And we believe that is a worthwhile benchmark.

1. The Radicati Group, 2010. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011"

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director

Update: clarification added to fifth paragraph.

Spam takes another hit: email authentication now available to millions of Google Apps customers

Google has been an early and consistent supporter of email authentication technologies, which help ensure senders are who they say they are, and in turn help to curb spam. Since we launched Gmail in 2004, we have supported email-signing standards such as DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to help validate outbound mail with digital signatures. On the inbound side, to help our users identify email from verified senders, in 2008 we worked with eBay and PayPal to authenticate their mail with DKIM and block all unsigned messages purportedly from those companies destined for Gmail users.

But the spam and phishing epidemics aren’t letting up – every day Gmail filters out billions of unwanted messages from our users’ inboxes – so we’ve been focused on creating helpful tools and working with the email industry to bring solutions that will help our customers. Email authentication is an important mechanism to verify senders’ identities, giving users a tool to recognize potential spam messages. In addition, many mail systems can display whether a received message is DKIM-verified, which helps spam filters verify and assess the overall reputation of the sender’s domain: messages from untrusted senders are treated more skeptically than those from good senders.

Today, we mark another notch in the spam-fighting belt: we’re making it possible for all Google Apps customers to sign their outgoing messages with DKIM, so their sent mail is less likely to get caught up in recipients’ spam filters. Google Apps is the first major email platform – including on-premises providers – to offer simple DKIM signing at no extra cost. Once again, the power of the cloud has made it possible for us to bring this feature to millions of customers quickly and affordably.

“We help the most-phished brands on the Internet manage their mail authentication programs, and the Google Apps solution is the simplest that we've encountered. Configuring DKIM for in-house systems requires plug-ins or additional gateway servers, making a company's mail environment more complex and difficult to manage. As a Google Apps customer, this feature took us only a few clicks in the control panel and an update of our DNS," said Kelly Wanser, CEO of eCert, an industry leader in providing critical protection against email fraud.

Starting today, all Google Apps administrators can enable DKIM signing in the “Advanced Tools” tab of the control panel. As more email providers around the world support DKIM signing, spam fighters will have an even more reliable signal to separate unwanted mail from good mail. We’re pleased to let millions more organizations use DKIM with this improvement.

Posted by Adam Dawes, Google Enterprise Product Manager

Improved migration tools for Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook®

With more than 3 million businesses using Google Apps, it’s been an exciting year for 100% web-based computing! To help make it easy for our customers transition to Google Apps, over the years we've launched several tools to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook and other IMAP servers into Google Apps. This year alone, customers have migrated over 3.5 billion emails to Google Apps, along with over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts. But we’re still working to make it even easier: today we’ve added new versions of our data migration tools for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook, which are available to Google Apps for Business and Education customers.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange: This tool lets administrators migrate data for batches of users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The new version features performance improvements and supports several additional IMAP servers, including Novell® GroupWise, Cyrus®, Dovecot® and Courier®. You can migrate email from @gmail.com accounts as well with this tool. We’ve also improved support for PST files and Hosted Exchange with this release. Please explore the administrator’s guide and visit the download page for more information.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook: This tool allows end-users to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from their Microsoft Outlook profiles or local PST file to Google Apps. The new version features improvements for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, and adds support for 2010. It also includes support for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Outlook. Head over to the download page to get the updated migration tool.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook: If some of your users want to continue using Microsoft Outlook as their email interface, this tool is for them. This tool now also allows seamless migration of existing data from Microsoft Outlook into Google Apps (via Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook), and keeps Outlook email, contacts and calendar data in sync with Google Apps accounts. Get the latest version from the download page.

Google Calendar Connectors for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes: Some customers still choose to operate in a dual-deployment environment, and to that end, we’ve also been busy updating Google Calendar connectors that allow bi-directional look-ups of calendar free/busy information for users in the organization still on Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. The new versions of the Calendar Connectors also now support the new Google Apps account infrastructure that brings over 60 additional Google applications to your Google Apps accounts.


Posted by Aditya Kulkarni, Product Manager

Getting the most out of Gmail

Last week we posted some tips to help you move from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. Today we’d like to share some more thoughts on making the most of Gmail.

Save time with Priority Inbox
A busy day often affords few email breaks. When you do get a chance to scan your mail, Priority Inbox helps you prioritize by identifying the messages that require your immediate attention. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to. The best part is it gets better the more you use it. Turn on and manage Priority Inbox in your mail Settings – and read our tips to become a real Priority Inbox whiz!


Seamless chat, video and calling
We work with people in multiple ways, and Gmail makes it easy for you to choose the most effective means to communicate: email, chat, text messaging, video chats and phone calls are all available from your inbox. For example, voice and video chat lets you have an actual conversation with someone or meet face-to-face in brilliant resolution. And for those early adopters transitioned to our new infrastructure, we recently added the ability to call phones in Gmail, so you can place phone calls from your computer to any landline or mobile phone number and receive calls as well. For phone calls and video chat, download this plugin to get started.

Get more attached to your email
Attachments in other email systems can be cumbersome; they take up space, can be hard to find and you have to open another program to take action, which slows you down. Gmail has some helpful features that let you quickly view attachments without the need to open or download them on client-side software. The Google Docs Viewer allows you to view .doc, .pdf, .ppt and other attachments in a new browser tab simply by clicking the "View" link at the bottom of a Gmail message. If you decide you want to edit the file, click "Edit online" to open it in Google Docs, or download it to your desktop.

Gmail also includes a Google Docs preview lab that lets you read the entire contents of a Google document, spreadsheet or presentation right in Gmail. Note that your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.

Put email in context
Wouldn’t it be great if you could update a sales lead without leaving your inbox? With contextual gadgets, you can. They display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and let you interact with that data right within Gmail. Your administrator or any third-party developer can build and distribute Gmail contextual gadgets to the domain with just a few clicks via the Google Apps Marketplace, which we launched in March. To learn more, browse for apps in the Marketplace that have ‘Mail Integration’.



The keys to productivity
With Gmail, we built in keyboard shortcuts to help you get through your mail quickly and efficiently. Once you enable this feature in Settings, you can archive (e), reply (r), compose (c), delete (#) or take just about any other action with one key or a short combo. For a handy guide, type “?” while you’re in Gmail – for maximum efficiency, print it out and post it at your desk.

Experiment in our Labs
Gmail Labs give users experimental – sometimes whimsical – features to customize Gmail in a way that works best for them. Some Labs accommodate preferences, such as adding a “Send & Archive” button, while others help you communicate, such as the Google Voice player and SMS in Chat. Still others help you stay organized, like the Google Docs and Calendar gadgets. If your administrator has enabled Labs for your domain, check them out for yourself.

What’s your favorite feature in Gmail? Feel free to let us know in the comments below. Happy (productive) emailing!

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

The more you know: switching to Gmail like a pro

Every day, tens of thousands of people switch from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we thought we’d share some tips on using Gmail.

Embrace conversations
Emails rarely come just one at a time; they’re usually part of a larger exchange. Gmail helps you manage messages more efficiently by grouping related emails into conversations. Conversations are a collection of messages with the same subject line and other similarities. When you click to read a conversation, you'll see all of the back-and-forth email responses that happen over the course of the entire email conversation.

This makes it easier to follow the full context of a conversation, and keeps your inbox less cluttered and more organized. If you prefer a more traditional view of your Inbox, you can always turn off Conversation view so that all emails arrive individually.


Forget delete, and archive your way to “Inbox Zero”
The average corporate inbox is only 300MB, which means too many people are forced to spend way too much time managing their inbox -- deciding which email to keep, and deleting the rest. With 25GB of storage, you probably won’t ever need to delete an email again because of storage limitations. And if you thrive on clearing your inbox, simply archive your emails to clear the clutter. They’re still fully searchable in an instant!

Search to sort
You may be accustomed to sorting email to find saved messages, which is a pretty limited way to find information because you usually know what you’re looking for. Gmail uses the power of search to help you quickly find what you want. You can even use advanced search operators to search by sender, date, attachment or a variety of other attributes. Try it and you'll find some of the qualities that Google.com is known for: great accuracy and really fast search results. Search is particularly more effective than sorting when you’re looking through multiple gigabytes of email!


Labels instead of folders
While you won't find folders in Gmail, labels give you even more flexibility to organize your email. You can’t put an email into multiple folders, but you can apply multiple labels to the same message, which makes it easy to manage information that may fall into more than one category.


By clicking on a label, you can view a chronological list of all conversations that have been tagged with that label. And you can even organize labels hierarchically, using the “Nested Labels” lab. (Your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.)

Work offline
These days you’re probably almost always connected to the Internet. But in those increasingly rare moments when you’re not, you can still access Gmail. When you’re offline, you can work in your browser to compose messages, search, organize mail, and do all of the things you're used to doing while accessing your email online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. To enable offline Gmail, go to the ‘offline’ tab in Settings, select ‘Enable’ and then save changes.

New features
As a web application, Gmail can be updated and improved without the trouble of purchasing, downloading and installing updates. This means Gmail will continually offer new functionality to help you be even more productive, like Priority Inbox, integrated voice and video chat, and labs such as Apps Search and Desktop Notifications. To stay current on new features, we encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates to the Google Apps suite.

We hope you enjoy the experience we offer -- we believe that ultimately, a fully-searchable, delete-nothing inbox makes for happy, productive people. But if you’re still not quite ready to use Gmail’s web interface, you can keep using Outlook or other clients of your choice. For more tips, check out our detailed transition documentation, and let us know what else we can do to make your move to Gmail easier in the comments below.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Threaded email or not, now it’s your users’ choice in Gmail

We didn’t build Gmail to work like all the other email options out there. We launched with a full gigabyte of storage per person (now 25 GB for business users), lightning fast search, labels instead of folders, and newer improvements like Priority Inbox to help you cope better with lots of information. While most Gmail users find that these features save lots of time, naturally there are people who want to keep using email in more familiar ways. That’s why we launched alternatives like Microsoft Outlook® synchronization, native BlackBerry® integration and IMAP support. More choice helps people move to the cloud more quickly.

Conversation view is perhaps Gmail’s most hotly debated feature. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years. Russ Midford, Senior Information Systems Engineer at Sanmina-SCI, sums it up well. “I personally prefer threaded conversations, but as an administrator who still needs to support some long-time Outlook users on Gmail, the unthreaded option is like gold.”

We really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people. So today we’re introducing another valuable choice. Users who prefer a traditional inbox can toggle off conversation view to see email as individual messages in chronological order. Some actions commonly associated with unthreaded email can be accomplished with searches in Gmail, so check out our tips on advanced search operators.

Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out conversation view settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel, and to individuals using Gmail.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, we hope we’re continuously making Gmail more useful to you. For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®, or contact our sales team.

Join the Google Apps team for a demonstration of this feature, a recap of recent Gmail innovations, and tools to help your school or business switch to Google Apps:
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT
On-demand webinar

Posted by Dong Chen, Software Engineer

Gaining Altitude: Productivity in the Cloud

As part of a new series, “Gaining Altitude,” we’ve invited well-known productivity experts and thought leaders to provide their perspectives on managing information overload and tips for success in a world where real-time communication and overflowing inboxes have become the norm.

This week we've invited Douglas Merrill to give his perspectives on productivity in the cloud. Dr. Douglas C. Merrill is the author of “Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right”, a book on personal and workplace organization. Douglas is also the Founder & CEO of ZestCash - a financial services technology company committed to serving the underbanked - and was previously CIO and VP of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, Douglas spent time at Charles Schwab, Price Waterhouse, and RAND Corporation. He has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton.

We are drowning in new information. For example, during the time it's taken you to read this far, people around the world have sent enough email to fill about 10,000 hardcover books.

However, the main barrier to getting organized is nestled between your ears: your brain. It weighs about three pounds -- roughly the same size as a roasting chicken. Your brain is amazing. You can recognize a person's face when you can only see their nose. Pretty cool, yes?

But your brain has limitations. You can't consciously remember more than about 9 items. To remember more items, you need to stick them into long-term memory and tag them with cues that you will use later to find the information. When you need the information you've learned, you "ask" your long-term memory by looking for information with matching tags.

But it's hard to predict what you will need a bit of information in the future. If you can't predict its use, it's hard to tag the information as you store it.

This is why filing doesn't work well. You mark a manila folder with a couple of words when you store it. However, since you can't be sure what you will use the information for, you don't know which words are best.

This is why many of us have drawers full of manila folders, all totally unused. We didn't mark them with the right tags, and so they aren’t stored where we actually need them to be. The same is true with email folders -- generally, people stick email in folders and never see them again.

Given how much information we face, and how much help our brains need to store it all, we need tools to help us. Enter Gmail. When you use Gmail, you leave your email in your Inbox and use search to find it. Instead of trying to guess what you'll need the email for later, so you can tag the email correctly, you just ask Google to find it for you.

Even though you search for your email, it still helps to tag them to improve your searches. Gmail will do some tagging automatically -- as in when it recognizes mails that seem important to you and puts them in your Priority Inbox.

Additionally, you could consider building your own filters to tag your mail. Unlike manila folders, with only a word or two as tags, Gmail can tag each mail with several labels, making it more likely you can find and use the email when you need it.

At the core, organization is being able to store and use information later. After all, the only reason you care about being organized is because it makes you more effective at what you are going to do tomorrow.

The combination of search and email labels let you do what your brain does well -- understanding -- and helps you do what your brain struggles with -- remembering.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

5 tips for using Priority Inbox

Cross-posted from the Gmail blog

It’s been a week since we launched Priority Inbox, and now that you've hopefully had a chance to try it out, we wanted to share some tips to help you manage your email more efficiently. Here are five ways you can make Priority Inbox work even better for you.

1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.





























2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.




For those of you who can't live without keyboard shortcuts, don’t worry, you can use the "+" and "-" keys to adjust importance as well.

3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.





With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.

4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can create a filter for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.

5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.

















Posted by Kristen Lemons, Gmail Support Team

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

Information overload is a reality of the modern workplace. The average corporate worker sends and receives more than 150 messages per day¹, an email deluge of varying importance: key project updates from colleagues, requests from higher-ups, appointment reminders, and automated mail that’s often much less important. With so much information to process, simply figuring out what needs to be be read and what needs a reply takes up a lot of time. Today, we’re excited to introduce Priority Inbox Beta in Gmail, an experimental new way of reducing information overload.

Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now we’ve improved Gmail’s filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Here’s how it works: Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”:



Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better. You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.

As a result, your inbox is better organized, and you can spend your time addressing your most important emails right away. When we tested Priority Inbox at Google, we found that people spent 6% less time on email after enabling this feature. This translates to a week’s worth of time saved each year for information workers who typically spend 13 hours per week on email today!²

Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager for Brady Corporation, says “Like many of our users, I get over a hundred messages each day. Priority Inbox saves me time by displaying emails in order of importance, letting me process them more efficiently than before. The time I save can then be spent on new projects that add value to Brady rather than managing my inbox.”

Over the next week, we’ll be rolling out Priority Inbox settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel.

Helping users manage lots of information has always been a core goal of Gmail, and we’re excited to see how Priority Inbox helps users in organizations mitigate information overload and get to important messages faster.

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

1. “Email Statistics Report, 2009-2013”, The Radicati Group, Inc, 2009

2. “Hidden Costs of Information Work in the Enterprise Exposed in New IDC Progress Report”, IDC, 2009

Search across your docs, sites and email with the Gmail “Apps Search” lab

Gmail makes it easy to find emails really fast with Google-powered search for your inbox. This works well when you know you’re looking for an email, but if you have information in documents and sites too, you may have to search several places with the same query to find what you’re looking for.

Today we’re making it easier to search across more of your data with the new “Apps Search” lab in Gmail. Once the lab is enabled, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead. When you run a search in Gmail, your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to results from your email.



We also offer “Did you mean?” suggestions when it looks like you’ve misspelled a word:



This is a Labs launch, so to get started, click ‘Settings’ within Gmail, then the ‘Labs’ tab, and enable ‘Apps Search’. Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain administrators to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps control panel. For more information on Gmail labs for Google Apps, see the Help Center.

Posted by Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer

Over 2 billion email messages migrated to Google Apps

While the majority of Google Apps customers choose to “go Google” quickly without transferring old data from their previous IT environment, some companies are reluctant to step into the future without bringing along emails, calendar entries and contacts from the past. To that end we’ve released several data migration utilities, including Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook®, which we announced last week.

These tools have helped unshackle thousands of organizations from their previous technology solutions. Our customers have migrated more than 2 billion email messages to Google Apps, and in the past 2 months alone, more than 14 million calendar events and 6 million contacts (not counting domain-wide address lists) were migrated to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange® and Lotus Notes®.

It’s been some time since several of our migration utilities launched, so we thought we’d summarize our data migration options here.

Migrating from Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook®:

• Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange is a server-side tool that migrates your company's email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. This tool works for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007, and both on-premises and hosted Exchange.
• Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® is an end-user tool that moves email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Outlook profiles, PST files and Microsoft Exchange accounts to Google Apps. This tool works with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, on-premise and hosted Exchange, as well as legacy PST files saved on users’ machines.

Migrating from Lotus Notes:

• Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes® is a server-side tool that migrates mail, calendar, contacts, and group information from your Lotus Notes accounts to Google Apps.

Migrating from other email systems:

• IMAP mail migration tool enables domain administrators to transfer the existing contents of users' mailboxes from an IMAP server to Google Apps. This tool supports email migration for archives hosted on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot.
• The Google Apps Email Migration API allows administrators and users of Google Apps to migrate mail from legacy email systems into their domain's hosted Gmail accounts. This API can be used by custom email migration applications.

Migrating documents to Google Apps:

• The Google Documents List Data API can be used for bulk migration of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs to Google Docs.

In addition to the tools listed above, customized data migration solutions are available from partners listed in the Google Apps Marketplace.

For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for IT managers looking to switch from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Gmail tips for businesses, big or small

Editor's note: This is the third post in a series to celebrate National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted two businesses (Revenue Spark and Smart Furniture) that have adopted Google Apps to help run IT more efficiently. We’ll now turn to ways that individual tools within the Google Apps suite are being used by small businesses everywhere.

Many businesses that use Gmail tell us it has fundamentally changed the way they manage email and communicate on a daily basis. They’re not alone ‒ since Gmail launched 6 years ago, it has become one of the most popular email applications in the world. However, we find that even avid Gmail users may not know about all the rich features and functionality that can help them work smarter.

To get every business up to speed, we posted some tips on today’s Gmail Blog for getting the most out of Gmail at work. Take a look, try them out, and feel free to share them with your colleagues.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Putting email in context with Gmail contextual gadgets

Since launching the Google Apps Marketplace in March, Google Apps administrators have deployed integrated third party apps to more than one million users, and today we're excited to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Gmail API that lets Marketplace apps present relevant information to users right in Gmail, when they’re reading a message.

Contextual gadgets in Gmail – like YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa previews – intelligently display relevant information from other systems as you read your email, so you can be more efficient without leaving your inbox.

Starting today, third party developers can build Gmail contextual gadgets and distribute them in the Google Apps Marketplace. These gadgets can display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and users can interact with that data right within Gmail. Contextual gadgets are yet another example how the power of the web can outpace traditional business technology.



Several new contextual gadget integrations for Gmail are available to Google Apps customers in the Apps Marketplace today:

• AwayFind lets you mark certain contacts or message topics as ‘Urgent’ and then alerts you via phone, SMS or IM when relevant messages arrive.
• Kwaga displays social network profiles and lists recent email exchanges with people you correspond with.
• Gist brings together information from across the web about people you’re corresponding with, providing rich person and company profiles, news and updates.
• Pixetell detects email links to video messages created with Pixetell’s video software and lets you preview, comment on, and share those videos without leaving your inbox.
• Smartsheet lets you access and update entries in Smartsheet’s sales pipeline and project management tool.
• Xobni, Rapportive, Manymoon, Newmind Group, and BillFLO have also launched their own contextual gadget integrations.

Like any other application in the Google Apps Marketplace, a Google Apps domain administrator can install a contextual gadget from the Marketplace with just a few clicks. Both before and during the install process, administrators can review the portions of an email the gadget will have access to, and can revoke that permission at any time from their control panel. For more information on the Google Apps marketplace, watch the overview video.

To learn more about the new contextual gadget applications available in Gmail, head to the Google Apps Marketplace and browse for apps that have ‘Mail Integration’.

Posted by Chandrashekar Raghavan, Product Manager, Google Apps extensions

Editor's note: Gmail contextual gadgets are available to businesses, schools, and organizations using Google Apps. Domain administrators can purchase and install contextual gadgets along with other applications through the Google Apps marketplace.