RAJEN SHETH: Hi.
My name is Rajen Sheth, and I'm product manager for Google
Apps at Google.
And today I'm going to take you through a tour of Google
Apps, which is our suite of collaboration and
communications products to make teams and organizations
more productive.
So Google Apps provides you a variety of tools, starting
with a personalized start page, and going through a set
of communications tools such as mail and calendar, and then
also providing a set of collaborations tools, such as
the ability to collaborate and communicate on documents.
And the idea is to take a variety of Google's tools that
we provide to consumers and bring it to a setting in which
organizations can use it within their organization, but
hosted by Google.
So I'm going to take you through what the experience is
like here, and the types of things that help make users
more and more productive.
So the user experience starts out here with the personalized
start page.
And with this page, there are a few things that are very
unique about it.
So first of all, it's essentially a portal that
users really will want to use, and something that people will
want to come back to.
And so it give the organization the ability to
customize the page.
So you can see that here, with, for example, the header
that's customized for this organization.
But critical to this is that it also gives the user the
ability to personalize this page to their taste, and bring
in the information that they want to see, and really make
this their dashboard for information.
So for example, I, as a user, can see everything from my
personal work information such as my email or my agenda for
today, to my corporate information, such as
integration to my news for the corporation, or integration to
my customer accounts.
And finally, we have over 5,000 of these Google Gadgets
that are out there, that you can bring in to provide a
variety of different types of information that will help you
during the workday.
And so I, as a user, can, for example, very quickly reorient
the page and drag things around to make this
personalized to my taste, and in addition to that, actually
add content onto this page.
So my company or my organization can actually
provide me a set of Gadgets that I can bring up to this
page, and then you can choose from the library of Gadgets
that Google provides that will give you a variety of tools
that will help make you more productive and
keep you more informed.
So from here then, this is the jumping off point, where I can
jump into the collaboration and communications tools.
So I'm going to jump into email.
So with email, what we're recognizing is that email is
really where collaboration starts.
Collaboration really starts where people communicate.
And so what we focused on here is not essentially trying to
take people out of the inbox, but make the inbox better and
better, so that it is a more useful tool for users.
So I want to highlight a few of the things that we've done
here to make this very useful.
So first of all, you can notice here that the quota is
extremely large, so with the Google Apps Premier Edition we
provide a 10 gigabyte quota for your mail, which lets you
preserve years upon years of email within this inbox.
So what this lets you do is really make email a very, very
useful tool.
Now the thing is, though, once you have a lot of this
information within your inbox, you also want to be able to
find it very, very quickly.
So we provide very, very fast sub-second response Google
search in order to allow you to find that information at
your fingertips.
So you could have literally gigabytes worth of email
within this inbox, but find it with just the click of a
search button here.
In addition to this, we provide a variety of tools
with the inbox that make you more productive.
So for example, here, you can see that this user just got an
email from a sales rep, and it's a very actionable email
that she needs to respond to very, very quickly.
So we provide a variety of ways that she can actually get
back to the sales rep on this particular topic.
So you can see that he's actually looking for the
status of a particular product.
Now I can see here that this user, Jason Jones, is actually
online by looking at the green dot.
And so as a result of that, we can actually type an instant
message and actually talk to the user right here.
So I'm going to tell Jason here that we'll get back to
him very quickly on the status, so that Jason knows
that that's the case.
The thing to notice here is that this is all within the
web browser, so it doesn't involve any other
applications.
i can access this, and access the full range of tools from
any computer, anywhere, that's connected to the internet.
And it gives me a very rich experience
regardless of where I am.
So the other thing here is that Jason is asking if this
is a meeting that we can make, so we provide tools to allow
the user to essentially add this to the calendar.
And so what we do here is interpret particular parts of
the message to give the user the right
tools that they need.
So here we interpreted that there's a meeting with Hestia,
and it's next Friday.
And so based on the date of the message, we interpret
exactly when next Friday is, and give you the option to add
this to the calendar.
These are just a few of the examples of the
tools that we integrate.
So at this point, we want to actually get back to Jason
about the status of this particular project.
So I'm going to type in "project orion dashboard." And
sure enough, I find an email where
this was being discussed.
So I'll go into this email.
Now this email is a very typical email of what you
might see within the corporation, and a few things
to note here.
So first of all, it's a very, very long thread.
There are many people that have responded to this.
So what we do is actually capture this within a
conversation.
And we have the stacked card view, which will let you see
all of the conversations very, very easily, and initially see
a summary of the conversation, and then be able to click, and
actually see the entire message in
that particular message.
The second thing to note here is that this is a typical
conversation where a document has been attached.
And then this document is subsequently edited by many
users, who proceed to make their changes and attach their
own version of the document.
Now the problem is that you end up with six copies of this
document, each with their own changes, and you'll have to
actually reconcile all of the changes manually.
So this is where we bring in Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
And Google Docs and Spreadsheets provide you with
a tool to allow you to collaborate on documents more
and more efficiently.
So you can see in this particular thread, Mary has
actually gone ahead and created a Google Spreadsheet.
And this allows everybody to be on the same page with that
particular spreadsheet.
So let me show you what this spreadsheet looks like in
Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
So this is what the Project Orion Dashboard looks like.
And you can see that it's essentially a shared dashboard
that tracks the project status.
And it's a very, very familiar user interface, where you have
the same kinds of capabilities that you would expect within a
spreadsheet program.
But it adds the collaborative capabilities that spreadsheet
programs don't provide.
So while I'm editing this document, and for example,
changing the status of a project, other people can be
editing the document at the same time, and updating their
status as well.
And as I'm changing this, I can see other changes happen
while this is going on.
In addition, I can actually then discuss these changes
with whoever is on, whoever is looking at the spreadsheet
right now, at this time.
And then I can also collaborate.
Now, this allows me to give fine-grained control over who
can edit the document, and who can see the document.
And this can change over time.
And then basically, any of the collaborators will then be
able to come in and make their changes in the document, and
get everybody on the same page.
Now one thing that's very critical here is that if you
have multiple people making changes to the same document
at the same time, you want to be able to see what
changes were made.
So we provide a Revisions capability.
So with the Revisions feature, you can actually step back
through time, and see the changes that were made at a
variety of points during the document's life cycle.
And then you can actually step back and revert to any of
these versions of the document at any particular time.
So we also offer a product called Google Docs, which does
the same thing for documents.
And so we provide the ability here to allow you to edit a
document, and provide you the same types of rich editing
capabilities that you would typically expect out of a word
processor, things like, for example, the ability to have
formatting, things like the ability to comment on
particular areas of the document, also the ability to
do things like editing tables or adding
images to the document.
But then, as with Google spreadsheets, you have the
ability to collaborate on this.
So you're able to add people that you want to collaborate
on the document with.
And then you can keep track of revisions.
So I can go back and actually look at what revisions were
made in this particular document.
So I can see, for example, who made what change in this
document at what time, and then step back through any of
the documents and see what changes were made within this
particular document.
So here, I can see, for example, that Cyrus added
these two lines, and then subtracted this line, about
three weeks ago in this particular document.
This is a powerful tool that allows multiple people to
write a document, and compose a document, at the same time.
Now once you're done with collaborating on a document,
the other part is, how do you get this information out to
all of you users, and how do you publish this?
So we provide you a variety of ways of
publishing the document.
So we allow you to essentially save this document in a
variety of formats.
You can save it as HTML, but you can also save it in a
variety of Office formats and as PDF, as well.
And then in addition to that, if you just want to publish
this internally to your company via web, you can
actually just click this link, and actually publish the
document to your corporation.
So going back to this message, the other thing that I needed
to do is actually add something to my calendar.
So Google Apps provides users a calendar, by which they can
not only keep track of their agenda, but in addition to
that, they can collaborate with other users very easily,
and bring in more and more information, so extending the
capabilities of Calendar to make it more of a
collaborative medium.
So a few things to note on this calendar.
So we provide a lot of the same functionality that you
would typically expect with a calendar.
So you can very easily create a meeting, by just adding this
to your calendar.
You can also drag this meeting around to another point on
your calendar.
You can extend it, such that if you want to have more time
for the meeting, you can make it a longer meeting, or make
it shorter.
But we've also added a variety of features here that make it
more collaborative.
So the first thing is that I can very easily create a
shared calendar.
So all I need to do is click on the plus link here, and
create a project calendar, for example.
Now this is then a shared calendar that I can then add a
variety of tasks to, and then share out with anybody within
my company.
And they can then overlay this on top of their calendar.
Now when I go and I create an event, I have a choice.
I can actually put this on my personal calendar, or I can
put this on any of the shared calendars that I have. So you
can see then when I bring in one of the shared calendars
what it does is it actually overlays the events on top of
my calendar in the different colors.
So I can clearly see what events are part of the Project
Orion Project Calendar.
In addition to having these shared calendars within your
organization, you can bring in other calendars from either
within your organization or from outside your
organization.
So for example, here's a calendar that a partner has
shared in with me.
So I can actually bring this in to my calendar, and
actually see what my partner's schedule is, in terms of free
and busy information.
So I can very quickly schedule a meeting with a partner.
But in addition to that, we have indexed a variety of
calendars out there, and provide you the ability to add
these counters onto your personal calendar.
So for example, if you want to keep track of events within
the industry, you can look up particular events and
particular calendars that relate to your particular
industry, and add that to your calendar.
In addition, for example, if I wanted to add calendars of
personal interests, so, for example, the NCAA tournament,
I can actually find what the calendar is for the NCAA
basketball tournament, and add this to my calendar.
Now this is actually a live calendar.
Now when I go back to my calendar, you can actually see
within this that we've added in the big games that will
happen for this particular tournament.
And this gets updated in real-time, so that you're able
to see any changes that happen to this particular calendar.
So this is the basics of the user experience.
It provides you all of the tools you need in your
everyday life to collaborate with your co-workers and to
bring in information that you need.
So the other part is we want to make this very, very simple
for the IT administrator of a corporation to very easily
deploy to their users.
So what we do is, we allow you to very quickly sign up for
this on the web.
So you can go through a very simple sign up flow, and
actually sign up for this service, and the up and
running within less than a minute.
Now, within here, you can then essentially choose the
services that you want to deploy to your users, and
activate those services.
So from this web-based dashboard, you can see the
services that you've activated.
And you can see status about the various users that you
might have on the system.
So you'll see a dashboard to see the kind of activity that
you have on the system.
You can then go into the various user accounts and
actually see, within here, who your users are, and actually
manage your users.
So I can go in, for example, here and change the password
of the user, suspend the user, delete the user, do a variety
of tasks that you typically want to do with the users on
your messaging and collaboration system.
We give you a variety of abilities to customize this
domain as well.
So we let you, for example, swap out the logo on each of
the applications and put in your own logo.
You have the choice with the Premier Edition of Google Apps
to hide advertising, and either display or not display
advertising.
And you also have a variety of information about your
account, including the ability to dial in and call in to
support, if you ever need any help with any issues.
Also, for each of the various applications, we give you the
ability to set policies.
So for example, within something like Google Docs and
Spreadsheets, you may want to restrict the ability to send
documents outside of your organization.
So we give you the ability to say whether or not users can
share documents outside of the organization, and if they do,
to warn them, and let them know that they're sharing
something outside of the company.
And we provide a variety of settings similarly for a
variety of the other applications here.
So in conclusion, really what we're driving towards here is
providing the end user very simple, very easy to use tools
that will make them more and more productive within the
workday, and providing the IT administrator a very simple
tool to be able to deploy these services to the
organization without much hassle, and as a result of
that, make both the IT department as well as your
users more and more productive.