Author Archive

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

(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.

Moving to the cloud often means bringing over a great deal of data from various legacy systems. At Google, we try to make this process as easy and seamless as possible for our users with tools such as Google Apps migration for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. These tools allow you to move old emails, calendar and contact data into Google Apps.

Directory information is another important asset to consider. About two years ago, we launched the Google Apps Directory Sync tool, which allows customers to sync their Active Directory or other LDAP servers with Google Apps to those existing repositories of user account information. Rather than manually re-creating and maintaining this info in Google Apps, you can set up Google Apps Directory Sync to continuously sync your users, user profiles, shared contacts, mailing lists, LDAP groups and more to Google Apps.

Last week we started rolling out Google Apps Directory Sync 2.0, an update that features new enhancements including:

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog.)

“Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from making two common mistakes: forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend).

We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback from people who avoided some embarrassing situations thanks to these features. And today, we’re excited to graduate them from Gmail Labs and start turning them on for everyone (they should start working in all Gmail accounts over the next day or so). Once that happens, as you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.



Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.



We hope these suggestions help you avoid some sticky situations — before you hit send. As you compose messages and see these features in actions, let us know what you think by tweeting @gmail with your ideas and impressions or leaving a message in the Gmail Help forum.

Posted by Assaf Ben-David, Software Engineering Intern, Israel

With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors. The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app.
Posted by Reuben Kan, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)
Ever wanted to make your Google site feel even more unique? Today, we added a wide variety of Google Web Fonts to Google Sites, making it easier to style your website and make it look awesome.

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)

We’re excited to announce that you can now upload images to Google spreadsheets. From the Insert menu, select Image... Then, choose an image file to upload into your spreadsheet.


With this feature, you can upload an image already stored on your computer, search for an image online, or add personal photos directly from one of your Picasa Web Albums.


Let us know what you think in the Google spreadsheets forum!

Posted by: Nick Santo, Staff Software Engineer

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Apps

Managing Google Apps for an entire organization is not always a one-size-fits-all job. Google Apps Administrators often need to securely share management responsibilities with others. These users may need to have access to certain administrative privileges like user creation, password resets or managing groups, but not to all of them. To address these needs, we’re launching Delegated Admin to our Business and Edu customers. With this new feature, your primary administrators or “Super Admins” can now offer other users specific administration controls.

Lukas Karlsson of the the Broad Institute summed it up, “I like the fact that I can create additional administrator accounts and grant them access to certain administrative functions without having to make them full-fledged administrators. Our organization is growing quite large and, as that happens, we want to grant more folks access to specific tabs in the control panel, so this is very useful.”

Joseph Dellano of Tempus Nova, Inc. believes, “this will be well-used by enterprises that have specific people in charge of of responsibilities like mailing list administration.” Specifically, a Super Admin can create a help desk for your organization by granting other administrators the minimal access necessary to do their jobs. Consider an example:

Collin is an IT Associate at your company who is responsible for helping employees who have lost their password or username. You can now give Collin the ability to access the “Organization & Users” tab in the Control Panel, so that he can manage user access to Google Apps. You can also further control which actions he has the right to perform. For example, you may give Collin the right to reset passwords, but not to create new user accounts.


With these customizable privileges, Delegated Administration is another way you can tailor Google Apps to your business needs. To get started today:

1. Log in to the Google Apps administrator control panel
2. Under “Organization and Users,” find and click on the user account to which you wish to grant privileges
3. Click the “Privileges” tab
4. To make the user a Super Admin select the check box labeled “This user has full administrative rights within this Control Panel.” To restrict the user's access to selected functions the Control Panel, select the check boxes next to the tabs you want the user to access
5. Select the specific actions the user is allowed to perform under each tab
6. Click “Save changes” to confirm that you want to grant administrator access to the user

When the user signs into the control panel, only the Dashboard and the selected tabs will appear in the menu bar. The user will have administrator access to the settings you granted them, but nothing more.

We look forward to continuing to make it easier to help Google Apps administrators share tasks across teams and Help Desks.

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Apps

Over the past few months, we’ve released a string of new features in Google Docs to give your business more tools for collaborative document editing and data analysis. From simpler file uploads to discussions and mobile editing in documents, we’re making it easier for you and your colleagues to work together on the web. Continuing with this effort, we’re launching pivot tables in Google spreadsheets, which will be rolled out to all Rapid Release users over the next 24 hours.

With pivot tables, you can quickly narrow down large data sets to get high level insights. Say you run a retail chain and you have thousands of rows of sales data broken down by purchase. It could be helpful for you and your sales manager to view the total annual revenue for each region without having to enter multiple formulas. In a matter of seconds, you can create a pivot table and summarize all of your data according to the factors you specify, all while collaborating with your sales manager on the spreadsheet.

To see how pivot tables work in Google spreadsheets, check out this video:



We hope pivot tables in Google spreadsheets will help you save time analyzing your data. For more details on using pivot tables, take a look at our post on the Google Docs Blog.