New & improved Google Apps reseller resource site

You'll notice a fresh new look to our resource site, which has also now been moved from apps.gepportal.com to reseller.googleapps.com.

The name change was made to create a more descriptive and memorable URL, consistent with our equally useful developer.googleapps.com and deployment.googleapps.com sites. As for the new look, the goal was to make navigation easier and surface previously low traffic pages that offer useful information. Changes were made primarily to organization and marketing content. There are redirects in place so links in the forum and bookmarks to the old site will be taken to the appropriate page on the new site.

Take the time to tour the site if you haven't yet done so, it should help boost the productivity of your Google Apps business.

Some key changes:

• simplified left navigation bar to focus on the most relevant content and make information easier to find
• addition of current news boxes on home page to highlight site updates or announcements, webinars and events
• addition of 'My program tools' section in left navigation bar so resellers have quick links to reseller console functionality
• revamped marketing section with a new structure and additional content including,
  • updated Google Apps logos and icons
  • updated Google Apps datasheets and case studies
  • a guide for writing case studies
  • a guide for hosting and participating in events and webinars
  • tips for creating a Google-related website or newsletter
  • info on Google products that can help resellers connect with customers (i.e. Local Business Center)

Enjoy the site and let us know what's missing that would help you find, sell, deploy, and support your customers.

Webinar: Migrating to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange

Last week we announced that it's now a lot easier for your Microsoft Exchange customers to switch to Google Apps with the new Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange tool. This server-side tool will help you migrate your customers' email, calendar and contact data in just 4 steps. To get up to speed on the functionality and learn about best practices, join us next week for a webinar hosted by the Product Manager:

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange
Tuesday, March 30
10:00 a.m. PT, 1:00 p.m. ET
Register

For more information, and to learn how other partners are using the tool, read our post on the Google Enterprise blog.

New complementary integrated apps in the Google Apps Marketplace

Exciting news tonight as we launched the new Google Apps Marketplace with important implications for customers, developers, and our reseller partners.

Resellers can help customers easily discover, purchase, deploy, and take advantage right away of a number of new third party cloud applications which are integrated in specific ways to allow ease of installation, management, and end user access. We anticipate our Google Apps Authorized Resellers will be able to leverage these initial and future complementary applications to expand the solutions they provide to Google Apps customers.

Secondly, solution providers providing Google Apps related custom application development can consider productizing their own integrated offerings for other partners and customers to discover, purchase, and install through the marketplace. To this end, we were joined in this launch by 50 participating developers, including our Google Apps Authorized Resellers Dito, LTech, SADA Systems, Cloud Sherpas, and Sheepdog.

New webinar series on feature updates

We're starting a new monthly webinar series covering the most recent Google Apps feature updates.

The webinars are target primarily for partners who sell & deploy Google Apps. The content will cover newly released features with details on how to use the features in customer deployments.

You can register for the first session (repeated for global timezones) here:

March 3, 2010 2pm Pacific - Register
March 4, 2010 7am Pacific - Register

Google Apps on ConnectWise TV

ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini came by Google recently and we filmed a discussion between Arnie, Aric Bandy from Agosto (a Google Apps Authorized Reseller), and Jeff Ragusa. Arnie and Aric have unique and compelling views on how cloud computing and Google Apps can be leveraged by IT service providers to resist commoditization and increase stickiness.

The result is a session being streamed this Wednesday February 24th at 11am ET and you can register here.

The session was produced for the ConnectWise user community, many of whom are asking themselves the degree to which they want to build out a cloud of their own vs leverage Google's cloud infrastructure.

Meet Enterprise developers at Google I/O!

We're expecting thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers at this year's Google I/O, our third annual developer conference. We'll be featuring a wide range of Google developer technologies, including Android, Google Web Toolkit, and App Engine, with an emphasis on Enterprise and Google Apps. Google I/O will be on May 19-20, 2010 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

To learn more about Google I/O and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Upload Any File + Standard vs Premier

As more companies move their business to the cloud, they need ways to manage, share, and access their data easily and securely. To help with this, we're rolling out a new feature over the next couple of weeks to enable Google Apps users to upload and securely share any file type to Google Docs. All Google Apps editions offer 1 GB of storage per user, and each user can upload files up to 250 MB in size.

Google Apps Premier Edition users can also use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files to Google Docs in batch, or integrate 3rd party applications to migrate and sync files to Google Docs from multiple machines:

Memeo Connect for Google Apps is a new desktop application that offers an easy way to access, migrate, and synchronize files to Google Docs across multiple computers. (PC and Mac)
Syncplicity offers businesses automated back-up and file management with Google Docs. (PC)
Manymoon is an online project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs.

This is one more feature that distinguishes the Standard from the Premier Edition of Google Apps. Join our webinar January 26th when our internal sales team and one of our long-time resellers will review the differentiating features between Standard and Premier Editions, and share their own tips on how to sell Premier. One of our product managers will also be on the webinar to provide more details on the Upload Any File feature described above, so you won't want to miss out! Register today.

Standard vs Premier + Upload Any File
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
10:00 a.m. PT, 1:00 p.m. ET
Register

See more details on uploading any file to Google Docs in the Google Enterprise blog post.