Full link for more information: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-people-widget.html

Google implementing Micro CRM features directly into your Google Mail is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

A bit of background: Google makes the operating system Android for mobile phones but does not create applications native to mobile platforms. This means we’ll begin seeing applications made for iPhone, Blackberry, etc that have been created and written specifically for those platforms. In the past Google’s efforts were into building and maintaining web apps that, while available from mobile devices, had been designed to be used by any device. They had worked very hard to develop platform independent applications that are available via a standard web browser.

I do not think that this will change their focus on these web apps, that is their core business and I don’t see that changing. I do however think that the development of platform specific applications will benefit them in a number of ways. Primarily people who used other devices had interactions with software that was not really purpose built just for them. This will let a larger audience see the usability that Google is known for and potentially draw new customers to them. The raised level of competition among the applications is only going to be a win for the consumer. We’ll get a higher quality product, though our expectations will rise as well which I think in the short term may hurt smaller development shops trying to fill the void that Google had left.

This is a rambling message, but I hope the intent is received – I want to hear what you think of these changes and the impact they will have.

Google to start building mobile apps. What do you think? is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

In that respect lets mention a few tools you can use to keep your accounts secure.
Start here: Gmail Security Checklist
Subscribe here: Google Online Security Blog

This will help keep you up to date on all the new techniques and scams running so you can properly protect yourself!

Happy Paranoia

Keep your account secure! [Checklist!] is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

In April, we launched a new version of Google documents. One feature that makes collaboration easier is improved commenting.

Connecting text to note

Comments let you make suggestions about the text in your document without modifying the document itself. When you click on a comment, the text it’s referring to is highlighted. And vice-versa — when you select highlighted text in your document, we identify the associated comment.

A detailed view of the comment box

Finally, we think the comment feature will give you flexibility to work with your notes in an intuitive and user-friendly way.

You can delete a comment by pressing the trash can icon above a comment. Or, you can respond to a comment by pressing the reply arrow, and it will show up just below the comment you’re responding to. You can hide a comment by marking the “X” button at the top of the comment.

Collaboration at the next level

The new version of Google documents is a built around collaboration, allowing you to work in real-time and to see what others are typing character by character. The new comment features makes it much easier to keep track of your ideas and notes while you work closely with others.

To try out improved commenting and other features, you’ll need to take the new preview version of Google documents for a test drive. You can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.

Posted by: Edgard Lindner, Software Engineer on the Google Apps Blog

Permalink

Use comments in Google Docs when working together is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

I’ve talked to a lot of small businesses that don’t have the budget or the resources to invest in and maintain technology. That’s why I love telling them about Google Apps — a suite of web-based office tools — and how it can help move their businesses forward.

I always find that it’s easier for small businesses to understand the benefits of Google Apps when one of our customers tells the story for us. So I’ve asked Stephen Culp, Founder and Chairman of Chattanooga, TN-based Smart Furniture and CEO of Delegator, to share his experiences with Google Apps, and how he took a company that started out in a Stanford professor’s garage and made it a success. (Sound familiar?) We’ll continue the conversation with Stephen and other Google Apps customers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce America’s Small Business Summit next week in Washington, D.C.

As the founder of three companies, an attorney, Naval Reserve Officer and former Peace Corps volunteer, I’m a believer in an entrepreneurial approach to virtually everything. Smart Furniture, for example, started back in 1998 in a Stanford professor’s garage, with a new business model called “Design on Demand®” that allows furniture and interiors for homes and offices to be customized for you, and more importantly, by you, all on the web.

Smart Furniture began as a small and growing company with phenomenal people, but limited budget (and time) for technology, especially the wrong kind. We tried for years to scale efficiently without pouring money into the “standard” infrastructure to run our business. We considered the idea of Microsoft® Exchange, and while the idea was great, in practice it got a lot more complicated — and expensive.

Then, in 2008, we discovered Google Apps. We liked the general virtues of SaaS applications that were inherent in Google Apps, and the fact that the applications improved over time without any effort from our team. Plus, the collaborative benefits were game-changing. Google Apps took that idea of efficient, company-wide collaboration and — unlike the alternatives — made it real.

In other words, for us, Google Apps does just what technology should. It frees up resources to focus on our actual business. It offers tools we didn’t have — or hadn’t integrated — before, including third-party apps from the Google Apps Marketplace. It replaces unnecessary layers of tech silliness with a simple, intuitive, integrated platform that actually serves us — our team and our goals.

Google Calendar alone increases our efficiency exponentially. Everyone can look at the same calendars, create new ones for events, projects or work groups, and share them, without having to master a byzantine instruction manual. Then there are the collaboration benefits. Before Google Apps, we’d constantly lose information as people changed roles or moved on to new projects. With Google Sites, we’ve eliminated the need for shared servers and their little air-conditioned server rooms, and replaced our entire intranet with one comfortably situated in the cloud. We use Google Sites to store company files and team members’ bios, and support our project groups. Meanwhile, Google Docs allows everyone to contribute to projects and idea creation — a key part of our company culture. We create documents to solicit feedback, track ideas, keep common agendas, take notes, prepare for meetings, manage inventory and even organize our company’s softball league. It’s part of almost everything we do.

Yes, our IT guys freaked out at first. Some thought that eliminating the maintenance of our previous system, a.k.a. Frankenstein, would make them no longer necessary. What they didn’t realize was how much better their jobs would get. Now they have the time to work on interesting projects — building, creating and innovating, rather than constantly rebuilding, patching and defragmenting. Our team is amazing, and we’re glad to have them back out of that air-conditioned server room.

At Smart Furniture, Google Apps helps build and support our culture, an important part of the secret sauce that has helped us succeed. Our culture keeps all of us working together, enjoying our days, not peering out the window wondering when we can clock out. As any company grows, it’s hard to maintain the sense of close collaboration that a small business has. Google Apps keeps us chatting (we all use chat in Gmail), collaborating, learning and growing together, as if we were still in the one-room office where we began — which was, incidentally, about the same size as the server room we were planning to build for Exchange.

In our experience, as a small business, the wrong technology can distract your team and drain resources, while the right technology can seamlessly support your goals. Both Smart Furniture and Delegator are on pace for greater than 100 percent growth in 2010. Customer satisfaction rates are at record levels, and we love where we work. For us, Google Apps is the right technology.

Stephen in the flagship Smart Furniture Studio

Hello Google Apps, hello real collaboration is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

The Microsoft Office productivity suite has dominated the workplace and become the defacto standard when it comes to making documents.  Everyone has probably worked with Office at one point or another to some extent but how many have really “used” it, you know pushed it to its limits, made it do things that most don’t think are possible, things that really show the value out of your $600 purchase?  From our experience, not many.  For those of you who do – that’s great, because I can make Excel flex with some VBA myself but when it comes to getting stuff done I feel its enormously bloated.

Bloat means that it has a ton of stuff that is non-essential and a waste of time, space and mental processing.  Wait, what?  Mental processing? Yes when you are looking for that button to freeze the top row in your spread sheet and you have to wade through 3 “ribbon’s” worth of junk to find it. That’s Office wasting your brain power.

So what do we suggest?

For the VAST majority of people out there: Google Apps

From the Official Google Enterprise Blog:

By no means do we think that Google could possibly develop all the functionality that any employee might need, but at the same time, there’s real value in services that all connect to a common backbone for core systems like contacts, presence and user authentication. Businesses need specialized accounting tools, CRM systems, marketing automation capabilities, project management tools and much more. Through the Apps Marketplace and our developer tools, customers can integrate 3rd party cloud services with Google Apps and enhancements they develop themselves. The possibilities are limitless.

Google Apps doesn’t do it all, in fact it doesn’t want to do it all because most people only need to do certain things.  But I’m always going on about how powerful Google Apps is right?  That’s because it is.

Within this year Google has committed to bringing Blogger, Picasa, Reader and more to Google Apps.  That means from within the same tool you’ll have access to all of your information, the ability to share seamlessly and tie in capabilities that other products just cant match.  Google Marketplace allows you to bring in tools tailored to your specific needs for a workspace that is not bloated, but custom. (Ask us how we can help your business create a great workspace.)

The Short:

There will be people who NEED MS Office, for the rest of us its cheaper, faster, better and safer to use Google Apps Premier Edition for our daily productivity.

Ask us

Office 2010 coming soon! is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

Since we founded this company it has been vital to our success and we meet people every day who say the same thing. In Indianapolis there is a rich community of active business networker’s, you must be selective and effective at how you use these. In our area we are launching the Indy Networking Events calendar.

Make a bigger splash at these events, more effectively use open networking periods to get to who we are looking for, and help new people get into networking who may have never tried it before.

Here is an example of what we’ve sent out to a few very active networker’s we already know and team up with:

We have shared a calendar with you to make finding networking events in the Indy area easier.  These will be primarily B2B/B2E events.

New shared calendar – we’ve seen a lot of success by going to events in numbers as we can help one another get to the people we are looking for by way of introductions in open networking.
Zach and I want to continue this effort and are sharing events with you to attend.  If you have someone at your organization that networks on your behalf please have them attend.

http://link.computersystemworks.com/indynetworking

Please use the +Calendar button in the lower right to subscribe to the calendar or add it to your Google Calendar App!
(if the +calendar link doesn’t work check out the bottom of this email)

We also want to look at this as a way to support people newer to networking.
We can make arrangements to meet prior to the event to give you a run-down or do some advance open networking.
If you are not familiar with these events or what to expect but are interested in attending contact us at:

sales+networking@computersystemworks.com
(317) 572-7371

If you have other networking events that you would like to make available to the group we can get those added for you!

How we did it:

From Google Calendar we simply created a new calendar and started coordinating our networking events in one spot.

We then publically shared the calendar to maximize its effect.

Finally we used Google Apps Premier’s ShortLinks tool to create a short link for what is commonly a very messy looking address for a public calendar to give it a polished feel.

This entire process took ~20 minutes to set up, there are probably many ways you can use this to effect within your own networking circles or organizations!

Enhance your networking with Google Calendar is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

The originating post from Google Blog states that Oregon is the first state that has switched to Google Apps for Education across all their public schools.

Who is going to be the next? This is an exciting time for Educators and Students as they get to work with real productivity tools that will follow them into the business world.

Future generations will be coming out of school expecting real productivity solutions in the workplace. Will you be ready or will they walk right by you?

Oregon’s saving 1.5m annually by chosing Google Apps is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

Google Campfire One is a developer conference for people working on the Google Platform. Video Below

Besides sharing with us some more of their clients and how many businesses have #GoneGoogle they released the Google Apps Marketplace. For the developers this makes it much easier to provide quality products that interoperate very very well together. For all of you users out there this means that there are a TON of great tools coming to you on your existing platform!

Here at Computer System Works, LLC we really want to help you be more flexible, productive and quality focused. We do this by helping you remove redundant work: the stuff where your eyes begin to cross, your fingers get tired and human error creeps in. This new Marketplace helps us do this even better.

We plan on going through a number of these apps, spending some quality time with them to learn more about how to properly use, or not use them. If there is a particular Google App that you would like to have reviewed let us know so we can move it up our list! In the mean time here are a couple of tools that caught our eye and we want to share:

(Please remember we’ve not yet been able to really dig into these yet. But we are working on it, so share with us your experiences!)

If you are interested in what Google Campfire One is all about: its a developer conference for people working on the Google platform to share new stuff. You can watch below:

Google Campfire One – Apps Marketplace Launched is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

Here is a short video to give you a better idea:

The great thing about Tungle.Me is that it will sync with your Google Calendar automatically. You won’t have to maintain multiple schedules or check anything out. It will update your availability from whatever your true availability is (less any additional constraints you add) on your Google Calendar. As events get scheduled and accepted it’ll automagically appear in your Google Calendar for you, invitations sent and all!

Check out more at: Tungle.Me
If you want to see it in action: Tungle Aaron

Tungle.Me + Google Calendar™ Schedule Success is a post from: Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works