Google Apps highlights – 1/8/2010

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Over the holidays, clever elves left us some nice improvements to Google Apps for individuals, companies and schools using our web-based services.

Co-editor presence in presentations
When you're co-editing in real-time, knowing where collaborators are making changes helps you avoid stepping on each other's toes. We already have visual indicators for co-editor presence in documents and spreadsheets, and now presentations sports this feature, too. You can see which slides others are working on, and if you're editing the same slide together, colored indicators make it clear which text box, shape or other element they're modifying.


Easier duplicate contact merging
Over time, as friends and coworkers send you messages from different email addresses, your Gmail contact list can accumulate duplicate contacts. We recently made it easier to find and merge these duplicates. To get started, just just click the 'Find duplicates' button in the contact manager. Cleaning up your contact list is especially helpful if you sync your Gmail contacts with your phone.


Google Apps on Nexus One
Speaking of mobile phones, the new Nexus One Android device is a great way to take Google Apps with you everywhere. Nexus One not only syncs with multiple Gmail accounts, but it also syncs your contacts, with Google Calendar and with Picasa Web Albums. Nexus One lets you instant message using Google Talk and access voicemail — including handy message transcriptions — with the Google Voice app.


Automatic page translation in Google Sites
Building the same website in multiple languages is lots of work, even if you're multi-lingual. With automatic translation in Google Sites, sharing information with people who don't speak your language is much easier. Just create your site in your native language, and visitors can instantly translate your site into any one of 51 languages that they're more familiar with.


Who's gone Google?
MWV is famous the world 'round among students and parents for Five Star notebooks and Trapper Keepers, but they make a wide array of other products and packaging that you probably see every day. We're thrilled that they've migrated over 12,000 employees to Google Apps, unifying their globally distributed workforce on a single email solution to address the complexity and frustrations of running multiple instances of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. You can find more on MWV's story on the Google Enterprise Blog.

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager