This Week in Google Apps 3/23 – Google VP Steps Down, Chrome #1 and more
March 23, 2012
2 minute read
Take at a look at this week’s biggest stories in the Google Apps Ecosystem:
- Last Friday, David Girouard, the Vice President of Apps and President of Enterprise at Google, announced his departure. Eight years after joining Google to run the company’s burgeoning enterprise business, Girouard has left to head Upstart.com, a startup that provides funding loans to new companies (and is backed by Google Ventures).
During his tenure, Girouard oversaw the launch of Google Apps, the evolution of Chromebooks into an enterprise tool and managed Google’s cloud applications, both for the consumer and enterprise arenas.
Following Girouard’s departure, Sundar Pichai, the Senior Vice President of Chrome and Apps will continue to oversee these areas and Girouard’s former team will report to him.
- There has been speculation this week that the Chrome web browser unseated Microsoft’s Internet Explorer from the top position for a day. Though the rumors have yet to be confirmed, we’re not surprised that Chrome has made its way to the top of the browser rankings. With abundant extensions, the ability to create different user log ins (one for work and one for personal accounts) and much more, we’re confident Chrome will be outdoing Microsoft in the long-run.
- We love learning how all types of organizations are using Google Apps to cut costs and increase productivity. In the latest Google Enterprise Blog post, The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont tells readers how Google Apps and third-party applications like fellow Cloud Alliance member Smartsheet, are making collaboration easier. Read the full story here.
- The General Services Administration, Washington’s real estate arm, is at the forefront of the government’s push to move IT services to the cloud, in an aim to cut IT costs and eliminate federal data centers. By the end of 2012, GSA aims to move all of its 17,000 employees to Google Apps for messaging and has selected Salesforce as its CRM and Fiberlink for mobile device management. We’re excited to see the GSA leading the charge in the government’s move to the cloud and await the migration of additional agencies in the coming months and years.
- Google announced a number of updates to Google Apps this week including:
The new feature is available to Docs and Presentations in English first, rolling out to other languages shortly and uses the web to power corrections. The web powered spell check provides contextual based suggestions (ie “Let’s meat tomorrow” will be changed to “Let’s meet tomorrow.”) and a constantly evolving vocabulary that includes popular new words – think bootylicious circa 2001.
Ready or not, Gmail’s new look will be rolled out to all users this Tuesday, March 27. No one likes change, but Gmail’s new look is extremely intuitive and user friendly. We suggest switching to the new interface now if you haven’t done so already.
Looking in your spam folder can be scary, but from time to time you might stumble across an interesting email and wonder why it was flagged as spam. This week, Google rolled out a new Gmail feature that provides a brief description of why spam emails were marked as such. This is not only interesting, but can prevent you from falling prey to the next phishing scam.
