Launched: Email retention policies and email delegation

A few weeks back, we let you know that Google Apps Premier Edition would soon support two new business-focused features: email retention policies and email delegation. Today we're happy to share the news that both features have been rolled out to Google Apps Premier Edition customers.

Email retention policies help companies comply with industry and government regulations by allowing their admins to determine how long an email should remain in the system before being automatically deleted. Email delegation allows employees to specify other users allowed to manage email for them – especially useful to executives and administrative assistants.

Premier Edition administrators can enable these features from the administrative control panel under the 'Email Settings' tab.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Specifying an image's license using RDFa

Webmaster Level: All

We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.



If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Peter Linsley, Product Manager

Grad tip: Go Google at work

In the spirit of graduation season, we've been doing a series of posts every Friday throughout the summer that provide tips for graduating seniors. Check them out here.

With summer soon coming to a close, we want to leave those of you who've recently started a new job with one last tip: Go Google. If you love using Google products in your personal (or school) life, why not help your company (or future company) go Google? Check out this video for inspiration, then find out more and spread the word.

For more Apps news
To get updates and news on all the Apps products, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Ask the Google Anti-Malware Team

Posted by Fabrice Jaubert

The Google Anti-Malware engineering team knows you have many questions related to our scanning and flagging of infected sites, some with short and simple answers and some with more complex answers. The short-answer questions are already -- we hope -- adequately handled on the Webmaster Forums; now we want to do a better job at answering the more complex questions.

To this end, we have created a Google Moderator page for you to submit your questions, and to vote on other webmasters' questions. In two weeks (on Friday the 28th of August), we will close the page and select a few of the top-rated questions. Over the course of the next several weeks, we will do our best to answer each of these in a write-up, to be published here and to the Webmaster Malware Forum.

We hope to repeat this exercise (with a fresh Moderator page) in the fall to give you the opportunity to ask more questions.

Thank you, and see you on the Moderator page!

Growing open government with Transparency Camp West

(If you're interested in meeting the team of Googlers working to strengthen the public sector and civic engagement through technology, check out our Public Sector blog. -Ed.)

Organizing public sector information isn't easy, and companies like Google rely on the good work of open government advocates to access useful data. Last weekend more than 150 developers, NGOs, wonks, activists and government representatives from as far away as Russia and Israel gathered at our Mountain View campus for Transparency Camp West to discuss efforts to make governments more transparent and accessible to the public.

Sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization founded in 2006, Transparency Camp allowed open government advocates to freely swap ideas about a wide range of topics: voting, journalism, public transit, healthcare, citizen engagement and more. The theme of openness also extended to the Sunlight Foundation's board meeting on Saturday. While most organizations hold their board meetings in private, the Sunlight Foundation opened their board meeting not only to staff, but also to members of the public.

The "un-conference" format let attendees decide session topics

At Google we're inspired by efforts to connect people to the political process, to useful public information and to their governments — and we're eager to participate. To hear more about the different kinds of bottom-up change proposed at Transparency Camp, head to the Google Open Source blog for a summary by Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation.

This and previous photo courtesy of Heather Bussing

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

New Search Ads Quality Guide Available

You're probably already familiar with the concept of Quality Score and know that it plays a major role in the way that Google decides when to show your ads and how to rank them. But, even seasoned AdWords veterans still have questions about ads quality, which is why we've put together the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Since introducing the concept back in July 2005, we've done a lot of work to make Quality Scores more detailed, accurate, and transparent. These improvements have included adding landing page load time, offering score diagnosis on the Keyword Analysis page, and displaying first page bid estimates.

The new Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide is a resource for how you can get the most out of your search advertising on Google. While we're not making any changes to the way Quality Score works, the guide is organized to help you understand some of the most important concepts around quality, such as: how quality score affects your ranking and how quality score affects how much you pay.

The new guide also offers useful tips on how to improve your ad quality and addresses some of your most common questions.

Whether you've been advertising with AdWords for years, or you just created your first campaign, we believe that the Getting Started Guide will be a useful resource for you to learn more about a topic that is at the core of advertising on AdWords.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Picasa photos in Street View

Earlier this year, we launched a new Google Maps feature embedding user-contributed photos into Street View. The new way of browsing photos has recently been enhanced with photo-to-photo zooming, which lets you explore some of the world's most interesting landmarks and landscapes in an intuitive and entertaining way.

Our first release of user photos in Street View only included photos from Panoramio. Today, we are adding Picasa Web Albums as another source of user-uploaded, geo-tagged images.

Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where we may not have any Panoramio photos.

We've selected these photos by looking for geo-tagged public images in Picasa Web Albums. We apply face detection to screen out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so that we're including the most relevant photographs.

The feature is available at major landmarks around the world, in places as different as Paris, Tokyo, and New Zealand. When you try it out, you'll discover how easy it is to seamlessly navigate between images from Street View, Panoramio, and now Picasa -- particularly with our new photo-zoom feature. Have fun exploring the world!

Posted by Daniel Cotting, Software Engineer, Google Zurich

New Interface Thursdays: Best practices for location extensions

A few weeks ago, we introduced location extensions - the new way to run local ads in AdWords. Today, we wanted to tell you a bit more about location extensions and give you some best practices for setting them up in your account.

First, it's important to know that there are two ways to set up extensions. You can set up extensions at the campaign level or at the ad level.

Setting up campaign level extensions means that Google will dynamically match a campaign's text ads with the most relevant address in your account based on information like a user's location or a user's search terms. Keep in mind that the address will only be shown when it's relevant to the user's location or search terms. We'll use a fictional chain of coffee shops, Bob's Coffee, to illustrate when you'd want to add campaign level extensions:

Add campaign level extensions when you want to...

• Use the same ad text across a number of business locations. For example, Bob has a "buy one cup, get the second free" discount at all his coffee shops. Bob can create one ad and run campaign level extensions because his ad text for this discount is applicable to all his locations.
  
  
• Direct ads for all of your locations to the same landing page. For example, all of Bob's stores feature the same drinks and prices, so he has a single webpage to greet online users regardless of their location.
  
  
• Create and edit a lot of ads quickly. For example, Bob's Coffee is introducing a "$1 latte Tuesdays" promotion at all its stores. If Bob creates a new campaign for this promotion and sets up campaign extensions, he only has to create one ad, and that ad will be able to show with any of the addresses associated with that campaign.

If you think these settings are right for your campaigns, you can learn more about how to set up campaign level extensions.

Ad level extensions allow you to override a campaign's location extension settings. When you use ad level extensions, you are selecting one address to show with a specific ad.

Create ad level extensions when you want to...

• Associate a single address with a specific marketing message. For example, Bob wants to test out a promotion at just one location before implementing it for all stores. He is going to offer a "Case of the Mondays" special, a free upgrade to a large coffee when you a buy medium coffee on Monday. Bob has created an ad to go with this promotion and only wants this ad to show for the one location where he's running the promotion. He doesn't want AdWords to match the ad to any of his other addresses, so he overrides the campaign setting with an ad level extension.
  
  
• Direct each ad to a specific landing page. Bob has also created a separate landing page within his website to promote the "Case of the Mondays" promotion. He wants to direct most of his users to the main webpage via his regular campaigns, but wants to direct viewers of the "Case of the Mondays" ad to a page specifically for the promotion.

If ad level extensions better meet your needs, read more about how to start using them. Remember, you can use a mix of campaign and ad level extensions in your account.

Adding addresses to AdWords

When you're setting up your extensions, you should also know that there are two ways to give your addresses to Google: use the Local Business Center or enter addresses manually into AdWords.

If you're a primary business owner, you should use Local Business Center to give your addresses to Google. The Local Business Center is a free tool that allows you to manage your business listings. Addresses you enter manually or through bulk upload here will affect how your free business listings and ads appear on Google.com and Google Maps. If you plan to use Local Business Center, you can learn more about how it works with extensions.

If you're not the primary business owner of the locations in your ads, you can manually enter addresses into AdWords. An example of a non-business owner might be a wireless hotspot company that provides Internet access at Bob's Coffee. The company doesn't own any of the Bob's Coffee locations, but might want to advertise that their Wi-Fi services are available at a Bob's Coffee location.

Whichever method you choose, you can add addresses from the same place in AdWords, in the Audience section of the Settings tab.

To learn more about location extensions, check out the location extensions overview section in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

North American publishers: Participate in AdSense email interviews

To help us better understand what's most important to our publishers, we've recently started conducting email interviews. Interviews are currently available only to publishers located in North America, but we're aiming to expand this program to other countries in the future.

If you're located in North America, you can sign up for a chance to participate in an email interview and openly discuss your opinions about AdSense with a market researcher. Participants will receive a $50 AdWords credit for their time.

If you're interested, fill out this form to let us know. We'll be contacting chosen participants via email; because space is limited, we won't be able to accept all applications.

Posted by Erica dela Cruz - Inside AdSense Team

Picasa Web Albums Stats

Posted by Lei Wang, Software Engineer

I took a vacation to Baja Sur a couple months ago, camera in tow. When I got back, I narrowed 500+ shots down to the 50 touched-up photos that I thought really spoke about the trip. I uploaded them to Picasa Web Albums, invited a bunch of friends and family to view and...nothing. After a few Picasa Web Albums comments and a couple email responses, my vacation had been quietly tucked into the shoebox.

How many people actually looked at these photos? Which ones did they like?

I'm happy to announce that Picasa Web Albums now gives you a way to find out. While viewing any photo or video, you can now see how many 'Views' it's received and also how many people liked it.

Views from all sources are included in the 'Views' count: Picasa Web Albums, photos embedded on a third party site, Google Image Search, etc. The view count is visible to anyone with access to the photo or video.

Clicking "I like this" allows visitors to offer quick feedback, especially when they can't think of anything clever to post as a comment. Similar to 'Views', the number of likes is visible to anyone with access to the photos or video.

The Iterative Web App: Outbox for Emails in Limbo

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Outbox.

With the web-browser-based Gmail for mobile we launched in April for iPhone and Android-powered devices, you can compose mail even when you're offline. That means you can write an email when there's no wireless connection, like in a subway or an airplane. And when you hit send, the message will be sent when the phone's network connectivity gets re-established. But what if you'd like to view the message that you just "sent" while still offline? Where can you find those 'sent but not actually sent' emails? Before today, the answer was "nowhere."

To solve this problem, we're now introducing a new feature, called Outbox. Outbox is a new label that appears in the menu when you have queued messages stuck on your phone and presents a read-only view of the subject of those messages. So if you want to make sure the previous message was sent before writing a follow-up mail, you can go ahead and find it in Outbox. Please note that you can read only the subject, not the body, of messages in Outbox.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

50 Chrome Experiments and counting!

When we launched Chrome Experiments in March, we wanted to create a showcase for innovative uses of web browsers and JavaScript. It was also our hope that artists and programmers from around the world would be inspired to submit their own experiments. Today, we're excited to announce that Chrome Experiments -- which started out as nineteen experiments at launch -- now points to fifty very impressive JavaScript experiments.

We'd like to send a huge thank you to the community for submitting such great work over the last five months. And we're thrilled to see many new submissions by developers from around the world, from Lithuania to Brazil to Australia. As the new generation of JavaScript engines make the web faster, we hope that you're enjoying the creative possibilities as much as we are. Some of our favorite new experiments include Depth of Field, Wavy Scrollbars, JavaScript Canvas Raytracer, and Bomomo.

The 50th Chrome Experiment, Sebastian Deutsch's 100 Tweets, shows a hint of the future by using the HTML5 canvas and audio tags. The audio tag, which is supported in Google Chrome Beta, allows audio playback without a plug-in.

We're very excited about HTML5 becoming standard in modern browsers. If you're thinking about submitting an experiment to Chrome Experiments, we'd love to see some innovative uses of this new standard. We're especially psyched about the video and audio tags.

If you haven't checked out Chrome Experiments recently, we hope that you take some time and explore all the latest experiments. Please keep the experiments coming, and, hopefully, we'll see you again at 100.

Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Getting your ducks in a row with snap to grid

Today, we're launching snap to grid in Google Docs presentations. Snap to grid makes it easy to auto-align text, images, shapes, and tables within your slides. This option is on by default, so you may have already used it without noticing anything, apart from a mild sense of euphoria.

But, there's more than meets the eye with snap to grid. Try out these handy keyboard modifiers:

[ALT] while dragging turns off the grid and gives you smooth drag (use [OPTION] on a mac)
[SHIFT] while dragging enables vertical and horizontal dragging guides
[SHIFT] while moving an object with arrow keys enables 1 pixel nudge
[SHIFT] while resizing preserves the aspect ratio of the object
[CTRL] while moving leaves the original object and drops a duplicate in the new location



You can disable and re-enable snap to grid through the slide context menu or the arrange menu.

Please let us know what you think on the Google Docs user forum.

Posted by: Andy Perelson, Software Engineer