Google today announced details of their new Google Apps Vault service which should be of interest to a great many people.

Currently Google offer enterprise email discovery solutions through it’s Postini and Google Message Discovery services. These are great tools but integration with Google Apps just isn’t there unless you use a third party (such as Backupify). With Google Apps Vault you can archive all of your Google data at the company level, including Chat and email – Google Docs support will be added over the next few months – and you can be sure it’s there as it now features an indefinite retention period.

The biggest issue faced with companies when investigation misconduct within the workplace is often finding information to show what happened, who did what, and who knew. With Google Apps Vault you’ll be able to search your Google Apps data company wide as well as be able to put a Legal Hold in place to retain information at the point of disclosure.

All this for just £5 per user per month. It’s great value and certainly something we’ll be posting more about over the next months.

More information and screenshots will be coming soon.

The first question I would most probably hear  is “ whats the point of a group?”. This is your equivalent to your distribution group in Exchange whereby email sent to one address is received by many people. Examples of this would be accounts@ or sales@.

In this blog we will see how to setup a basic distribution group in Google Apps for Business in 10 easy steps.

1) Sign into your Google mail as a Super Administrator or someone with privileges to create groups.

2) Once signed in, you will notice a cog symbol on the top right of your screen. Click on it and choose Manage this Domain.

3) Click on Groups on the top bar of your google page. This page will allow you to see and create any groups.

4) Just below the blue menu bar, you will see  Create a new group. Click on it.

5) You will now get the following screen. Fill in your group name, email address for that group and a description. Your access level will usually be set to team and click on the Create new group button.

6) If the email you entered already exists, you will get the following error. If this happens then change the email address assigned to your new group and click Create new group again.

7) You should now be taken to the Members screen where you can add users to your group. Enter the full email address of the people you want to put in the group in the  new members box and click Add.

8) Once your Group has been created you will need to allow external users, people not in your company, to send emails to this group. By default new groups are set up in such a way that only the people shown on the Members screen can send or receive emails to or from that group. You can do this by going in to the Access settings screen and choosing “Anyone can post”.

9) Once you have all radio buttons selected as above, click Save changes.

10) That is it.

Many users are facing have to transition to Googles new integrated Google Apps services. This brings access to all – or most – of the Google services for your Google Apps accounts. Your Google Apps administrator can then enable or disable features for users within the organisation.

Since we transitioned our accounts we’ve had problems logging in to several Google compatible apps such as the excellent Reeder for the iPhone or the Google Picasa uploader for iPhoto. Both of these worked fine before transition but not afterward.

We found that simply changing the passwords for the affected accounts let these services start working. Changing them back to the previous password caused the services to stop working again. Also deleting the account and recreating it also got things working, though this is less likely to be a realistic option.

Three days ago Japan suffered one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. While Japan deals with the aftermath, a great many people and businesses will be trying to recover and start trading again. Given the impact on the economy such recovery is no less important that the more obvious recovery effort we are seeing on TV. The question is, how would your business far when faced with a disaster?

Information is king
The most obvious question is “Can you get your data back?”. Modern businesses are as reliant on their data as they are on their staff. Getting back in touch with your clients, knowing the state of projects, finding out who owes what invoices, is the bread and butter of daily business life and it all depends on your data. Clearly, when looking at the Japanese earthquake, it’s easy to see that simply having offsite backups wouldn’t have helped. Taking tapes offsite may not be an ideal solution when the immediate area is no longer accessible, along with the tapes that contain your backups. A better solution would be to make sure that a copy of your data is stored somewhere else entirely, either with a third party backup provider, or maybe sent to another office on a regular basis. This could be done alongside conventional tape or disk backups so that you have a choice of either quick and local or distant and reliable.

Staff are pretty important too
Of course data itself isn’t the only aspect that you need to pay attention to. Having the staff to process the data, to run the business, is clearly vital and in a disaster situation – whether that be on the scale of an earthquake or just an office fire – staff need to know what to do. You need to have an action plan that details not only how to get in touch with every employee but who is responsible for doing what. This action plan should be made available to each employee and updated often and the employees should be kept informed of these changes. Finally the action plan should also explain to each employee how they can go about working from home or from another office. Having a VPN to your office is great for home working but doesn’t really help any when the office is on fire. Being able to recover your data is vital but users do need to be able to work on this data and it needs to be restored to known location which is accessible to everyone.

Another way of working
As you can see, disaster planning, even on such a simplistic scale, can be tricky stuff. This is one of the strong points of the cloud ethos. We’re talking real cloud computing, distributed services that are independent of locale. Too much use is made of the term Cloud when what vendors really mean is Hosted. Having a service available on a server in a data centre does not make it a cloud service, it makes it a hosted server. A cloud service typically utilises a distributed model, spread over many servers in many locations, perfect for disaster recovery.

Moving your email to Google, a great example of a cloud service, makes it available in the event of your office burning down. It would also be pretty secure against the loss of any single data centre, meaning that should the south coast of the UK be hit by a Tsunami, the data will still be available the next morning. Of course other email services are available, Microsofts upcoming Office 365 is another great solution. Looking again at the example of the Japanese earthquake, hosting your email with a local ISP running their email on a handful of servers at the local data centre, while doing a lot for the local economy, doesn’t make it reliable in the event of a massive local disaster. Even if the idea of a full blown move to Google Apps for Business is too much for your email administrator to take, why not use it as a fall back solution? You can have your email delivered to your office server and then forwarded on to Google Apps. In this way your users have a cost effective, reliable, disaster proof way of continuing their emailing and access previous content.

A similar approach can be taken to file storage. While it’s not a complete replacement for a reliable backup, such services as Amazons S3 file storage can be used to give you a great level of reliability. If you have worries about using such services as your main day to day data storage, and a lot of companies are dependant on less than perfect internet connections, then why not use it as a great fall back option? Keep files internally and continue with your current backup regime but then drop in to this a weekly or monthly upload to a cloud file storage service. In this way your office internet connection is used efficiently and when disaster happens your users can follow the instructions for accessing your data in the cloud from any home, coffee shop, or remote office. Your backups, for the data since the last upload to the cloud, can then be restored in to this pool of data. When normality returns you can then decide whether you want to download all this recent data to a new server and let your users work locally.

And finally
You can see that with a smidge of common sense, a few monthly ££s, and very little work, you can end up with a very reliable disaster fall back plan without having to redesign how you work at the office at the moment. By cherry picking the best bits of todays technology your business can really benefit and you can work through whatever is thrown at you.

It seems that every day brings a new feature release from Google for their Google Apps services. Today it’s the release of mobile editing for Google Docs.

Up till now you could edit docs on the move on your phone or device if the browser was sufficiently capable but often the screen would be rendered for a desktop size display and, frankly, it would be unreadable. Now there’s a dedicated mobile editor which gives you real time editing to Google Docs so you can make edits and tweaks on the train and make it look like your in the office :)

It’s been the end of a very busy week here at G2 Support but I just wanted to update you on our trials of the new Google Outlook Sync tool. We plan to do a full guide to setting up the sync tool in the future as well as a workaround to a few issues, but for now here’s a summary of a week with the Outlook Sync tool.

So far the results have been mixed. We’ve used it to import various sizes of mailboxes and also as a live sync tool to download emails from Google in to a new Outlook PST and to sync changes on-the-fly.

Bad news first
By far the most issues came when we were trying to import an existing Outlook mailbox in to Google Apps. In our case it was one of a number of Exchange accounts. The biggest issue appeared to be that the sync tool just stopped syncing at random times. There are few settings in the sync tool to play with and adjusting the size of the expected mailbox by right clicking the sync tool icon seemed to do little to help this. Quite a few times we were left with an apparently fully synced mailbox which was missing all emails from the last 48 hours (for example, though in some cases we were missing several weeks worth). Closing and re-opening the sync tool didn’t help in these situations and the only way to kick start things was to re-run the initial import, but of course that leaves you with duplicate items; not much fun when you have thousands of emails to sift through.

Above: Duplicates in Outlook. Below: The same duplicates in Google Apps

Now the good news
The good news is that we had more luck when using the sync tool as a replacement to IMAP to allow us to use Outlook with our Google Apps account. Starting with a populated Google Apps inbox we used the sync tool to fill Outlook with emails, calendar items and contacts and we could use it without any problem. It certainly gave us a better experience, and fewer issues, than using IMAP between the two.

It may be that the issues we’ve had here with the sync tool failing to import email are down to the functions responsible for reading email from an existing Outlook mailbox rather than any issue with the syncing part of the tool. If this is the case then people who want to use Outlook with an existing Google Apps inbox or to replace IMAP should be fine.

We’d like to see more options in the sync tool, particularly a better indication of what it’s doing, which emails have been synced, which are currently being synced, easy access to a log file etc. A de-duplication feature would be a god-send as well.

You may have completely different results to us, and if you do find a solution to any of the problems here do let us know. We’ll be posting more about the sync tool in the future after we have some more real world experience of it.