Improvements to Google Apps contacts

Today, we're happy to announce updates to contacts in Google Apps: new features that many of our enterprise customers have been asking for.

For starters, we've launched a new API that, when combined with the existing shared contacts API, gives administrators the ability to maintain an updated and detailed global address list in Google Apps.

We've also updated the Contacts interface throughout the Google Apps suite – particularly in Gmail – making it easier for employees to find and start collaborating with all other users on their company domain.

Global address list management

These GData APIs let administrators maintain and manage their company's global address list in Google Apps.

User profiles API

Administrators can retrieve and update profile information for all users on a company domain, giving companies the option to provide rich user information to make it easier for employees to find and contact each other.

Shared contacts API

This API (launched in December of 2008) lets administrators perform all of the above, but for users who do not have accounts provisioned in Google Apps, ensuring that all users (not just those with a Google Apps account) are accounted for in the company's global address list.

These APIs are available exclusively to Google Apps Premier Edition customers.

Enhancements to Contacts

Until today, the only entries that would appear in Contacts in Gmail were those that the user had either explicitly added or had previously emailed. Starting today, when you search for a name, you'll see relevant results from your company's entire global address list, not just people you've emailed with in the past.

We've also made some improvements to the Contacts interface. When administrators add user details (job title, office location, department, cost center, etc.) through the APIs above to the company's global address list, the additional information provided will also display, making it easier for users to get in touch with each other. This also ensures that you get the most updated contact for everyone in your company.

Posted by Florian Niemann, Engineer, Google Apps team

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UPDATE: Please note that these changes are enabled for users of Google Apps Premier Edition and for users of Google Apps Education Edition. We apologize for the omission of educational users in our original post.

Q2 2009 Spam Trends

Editor's Note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which provide email security to more than 50,000 organizations, including businesses of all sizes, government agencies, and educational institutions. To learn more about what the Gmail team is doing to keep spam out of your inboxes, check out this post.

Our "Spam Trend" update last quarter summarized the rise in both levels and types of spam, with new players and techniques entering the market. This quarter, proliferation continues, with an unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes as 2009 moves along. Overall, spam is measurably up: Q2'09 average spam levels are 53% higher than in Q1'09 and 6% higher than in Q2'08.

After last November's McColo ISP takedown, when spam volumes dropped by 70%, spammers worked overtime to fill the void. They succeeded: Within four months, spam levels rose back to pre-McColo levels. This upward trend continued through June 4, when another large ISP spam source, 3FN, was reported to have been dismantled. Spam volume immediately dropped 30% – not as extreme as McColo, but still significant. Although this created a sudden dip in spam levels, it also created an open invitation for opportunistic spammers to once again seize a market opportunity.

Over the coming months, we anticipate watching new players once again drive spam levels back up. Since June 4, spammers have already made up a significant amount of ground, climbing 14% from the initial drop.

Here's what the trend looked like, as tracked through Postini filters, over the past six months:

"Unpredictability" summarizes the overall trend as Q2'09 winds down and spammers test both new and "retro" techniques. For example, on June 18 we tracked a new attack that unleashed 50% of a typical day's spam volume in just two hours' time. This attack used a simple "newsletter" template – somewhat "old school" by today's spam standard – with malevolent links and images inserted into the content. Google's Postini filters detected more than 11,000 variants of this spam during those two hours. Because this spam enabled spoofing of the recipient domain (meaning the "from" field was falsified), distribution lists were especially hard-hit by this attack.

Resurgence of image spam

One of the other trends we're watching closely is the sudden popularity of "image spam" – a form of spam that rose to prominence in 2007, before most anti-spam filters learned how to block it. It's simple stuff: basic email with advertising content, usually containing a related image. They can also include malicious links or content – and either way, the large file size of an image spam can place a heavy load on an email network.

An image spam email might look something like this:

Evidence of the resurgence in image spam can be seen in the graph below, which shows that the actual size of spam messages, measured in bytes, is back on the rise:

There are a couple of possible explanations for the resurgence in image spam, despite the fact that most spam filters out there have adapted to the technique. One theory is that this wave is designed to test the defenses of the different spam filters out there, so that spammers can do statistical analysis on what subject lines and content have the highest probability of success.

Another is that there may be some new players entering the spam game, following the McColo and 3FN takedowns, and these new players are opening with some well-tested techniques. Either way, we're watching this trend and will share insights as we gain them in the weeks and months ahead.

Spike in payload viruses

June was also an active month for viruses sent as email attachments, otherwise known as "payload viruses." Volumes rose to their highest level in almost two years as spammers returned to yet another tried-and-true technique to expand their botnets.

As you can see in the chart below, June's activity is almost as high as the two-month payload virus surge seen in Q3'07. Fortunately, Google's Postini zero-hour heuristics detected this uprise early and kept payload attacks in the cloud and away from users' email networks.

Everything old might be new again

In summary, Q2'09 saw continued unpredictability and the resurgence of old-style spam attacks. Are spammers finally running out of original ideas? And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago? And what are spammers looking to accomplish as they unleash these remakes? Only time will tell.

For more information on how Google email security services, powered by Postini, can help your organization provide better spam protection and take a load off your network by halting spam in the cloud, visit www.google.com/postini.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google message security and archiving team

Updates to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

When we announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook a few weeks ago, we committed to improving it over time to make the Outlook experience on Apps as similar to the experience on Exchange as possible. We first focused on making mail, contacts, and calendar work really well, because those are the features that the more than one hundred companies who tested Apps Sync before launch asked for. Today we wanted to share a couple of updates on our progress in improving compatibility.

We worked closely with Microsoft to address two issues that we shared recently, and we appreciate their help. The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you can choose between the native Outlook search, which has been available since launch, and Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook. We've also worked with them to add support for accessing Windows Live Hotmail via the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector plug-in.

We also added an option to allow users to enable or disable autoarchive during installation, improved the two-way synchronization of notes in contacts, and improved our installation to make it more clear where data in other Outlook accounts is located. To access these additional features and fixes, current users are being updated automatically to the latest version, and it's available immediately to new users here. As always, you can find more detailed information about Apps Sync in our help center, and we're going to continue to add more advanced features in the coming months.

Since the release of this tool, many businesses have asked us for more information about switching from Microsoft Exchange, so we've pulled together a Google Apps resource site that centralizes information for businesses coming from an Exchange environment. It has information about Google Apps, answers to your due diligence questions, customer feedback from those who have switched before you, and more.

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

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Apps Status Dashboard goes global in 24 new languages

We launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard in February as a tool to help us communicate better about the performance status of our Apps products. We've received a lot of positive feedback from customers, and we've been working to make the Dashboard even more useful.

Today we're taking the next step and making the Dashboard available in 24 new languages. Take a look at the status of our Apps in Español or in 日本語. Our announcements on the Dashboard will be available in all supported languages, and the language you see will correspond with your settings and preferences. There may be times when we'll give you a link to additional details in English or a smaller subset of languages in the interest of communicating as quickly as we can, but you'll always find an announcement about the current status of our Apps products in the language you select.

The Dashboard is now available in the following languages: English, Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

We encourage you to check out the Dashboard and keep it handy for the next time you want to check on the performance of our Apps.

Posted by Matt Drake, Software Engineer

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Guest post: "Boise State takes the cake with Google Apps"

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Brian Bolt from Boise State University's Office of Information Technology as our guest blogger today. Boise State University recently selected Google Apps Education Edition to address messaging and collaboration needs for more than 20,000 students, staff, and faculty users, realizing drastic cost savings and reducing countless IT hours.

To hear more about how schools like Boise State are using Google Apps, Google is hosting a series of free education-focused webinars starting on Thursday, June 25 with a discussion led by Arizona State University on Thursday, June 25. We hope you'll join us!

In early 2007, we at Boise State University learned of Arizona State University's deployment of Google Apps Education Edition to their student population. At that time, we were at a crossroads between upgrading email for employees and students and pressure to change the email application that was in place since 1996. We recognized ASU's move to Google Apps for students as a shift in application delivery to supported end-users – the move to the "cloud" of Internet-delivered services and support.

By choosing Google Apps for Education, Boise State could redirect resources and personnel away from an ever increasing drain on budget dollars and support time, to other critical education-focused applications and still have a leading edge communication and collaboration platform.

Boise State administrators and faculty were visionary in agreeing with the movement of email, calendaring and document collaboration to Google. Collaboration between students, between students and faculty and between staff are all now easily facilitated. It was as big a change as the integration between email and calendaring in the late 1990s. The early 2000 mantra of "anywhere, anytime on the web" was finally a reality.

The rationale for deploying Google Apps for Education to Boise State students was predicated on the University's strategic vision of "Charting the Course," which defines a road map for Boise State University's goal to become a Metropolitan Research University of Distinction. Taking our directive from the University's Vision Statement, we contacted Google to begin the process of providing Google Apps for Education to the campus.

We started with the task of moving all student accounts to Google Apps in 2007. This equated to the migration of more than 20,000 accounts. The student account move was smooth and adopted with minimal support. The students were very adaptive to change. The major hurdles of a mail system migration were not seen by the end user group, as we linked authentication and account creation to the University identity management system.

Soon after we successfully implemented the student mail system, we contemplated the possibility of moving faculty and staff to Google Apps. The prospect of migrating faculty and staff from an enterprise messaging system to Google Apps was altogether different from displacing the simple mail system our students used. We accepted the idea that a transition would be more difficult than the student move, but we believed that once the tools were in place, and people acclimated to the functions and features of Gmail and Calendaring, the University would be in a better position to communicate and collaborate.

Security was the initial hurdle put in front of the move by most of the colleges and departments. We began an education campaign to explain that not only was Google a leader and innovator in the application area, they excelled at security and privacy in the services they provided to their educational partners. Google has offices of information security personnel compared to the handful at Boise State.

Now that the migration of our 3,000 faculty and staff is complete, we have a new realization: deploying Google Apps and reallocating resources is just the beginning. We have new tools to explore and share; collaboration was the unexpected silver lining of the Google Apps suite. Having Google Apps as a keystone technology establishes the foundation from which we can support the University's strategic vision of Charting the Course and its commitment to academic excellence, public engagement, vibrant culture and exceptional research.

After our migration was done, we hosted a celebratory lunch for those involved in the project. All of the dishes were delicious, but the highlight was the cake, courtesy of Tonya, our in-house pastry chef. Yes, it is entirely edible, and it tasted amazing too!

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

Google Apps for Education webinar with Arizona State University

We're passionate about learning here at Google and always revel in the innovations that educators drive when they work with Google Apps. To share some of the latest innovations we've seen in this arena, we're hosting a free, live educational webinar to show the power of Google Apps Education Edition. In this session you'll hear directly from Arizona State University, the first school to deploy Google Apps Education Edition. Learn about their 2006 decision to go with Google Apps, the results they've seen so far, and their future plans for working and teaching with Google Apps. Details follow:

Google Apps for Education
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

We hope you'll join us to learn how Google Apps can help institutions like ASU save money and IT resources, all while making it easier for teachers to innovate and for students to learn and work together.

Read today's news about Google in education, and what schools are learning as they start using Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education marketing team

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What's different with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

We built Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook to make it as easy as possible for people who love Microsoft Outlook to continue to use it when their company switches to Google Apps. In developing the feature, we focused on allowing Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for business email, contacts and calendar. But we also recognized that many people add plug-ins to Outlook for additional features. For that reason, we worked to ensure that as many plug-ins as possible continue to work, like salesforce.com and WebEX.

Unfortunately, some plug-ins don't yet work with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the more common ones:

• Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
• Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar
• Outlook Change Notifier

If you would like to continue to use these plug-ins, uninstall Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and the uninstaller will re-enable the plug-ins.

We'd also like to highlight another known issue that may be of interest. Programs that interact directly with the Outlook data file, including Windows Desktop Search and PGP.com's encryption plugin, don't currently work well with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

Windows Desktop Search will not properly index Google Apps Sync data files, so in order to stop indexing from running indefinitely, the Google Apps Sync installer disables it. We recommend using the default Outlook search.

If you want to re-enable Windows Desktop Search for your Outlook data files, you can uninstall Google Apps Sync. If you are using Google Apps Sync version 1.0.22.1945 or lower, you must first install the latest version and then uninstall Google Apps Sync to re-enable indexing.

You can find more information about what's different in our help center. We're working with Microsoft and other partners to help fix these issues and support additional Outlook features like multiple calendars. We'll keep you posted on our progress.

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps