App Awareness Month – Lucidchart

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week, we’re focusing on applications that make collaboration easier and provide seamless document management. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Lucidchart – Diagrams Done Right

Creating diagrams and flowcharts can be a tedious process, but Lucidchart, an HTML5-based diagramming tool, makes all of these capabilities easily accessible from your Google Apps account.

Lucidchart lets users create flowcharts, wireframes, business process models and other diagrams from an easy-to-use and extremely intuitive interface. With hundreds of templates and shapes, users can quickly add and connect objects, select custom colors and drag and drop custom images from your desktop right into your work, resulting in a highly customized diagram built to suit your needs.

And once you’re done working, you can easily export your new diagram to PDF, PNG or JPG, embed it on sites and share through Lucidchart to collaborate with another user.

Google Apps Integration

Lucidchart will integrate seamlessly with any Google Apps domain. After a domain administrator installs the app via the Marketplace, users can access Lucidchart from the ‘More’ drop-down menu at the top of the Gmail inbox.

Once you’ve entered the application, you can begin creating and most importantly, sharing your work with other users, both within and outside of your domain. Collaboration on Lucidchart should seem very familiar. The process closely mirrors collaboration in Google’s native products and includes real-time collaboration, with changes synced instantly, an unlimited number of simultaneous collaborators, powerful version control with full revision history (in case a co-worker makes a change you don’t agree with), group chat and the ability to share custom images and templates across an organization.

Why We Like It

Our developer team uses Lucidchart every day at BetterCloud. Whether mocking up a new website page design, creating a work process flow or modeling an object, the tool makes everyday tasks easier. With our development team split between New York City, Atlanta and Buenos Aires, the real-time collaboration features of the application are very useful.

Lucidchart offers a free version as well as a two-week trial of premium features and tiered plans and features so your team can choose the model best suited to your needs.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: Our developers use this tool every day!

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These Google Apps extensions not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.