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Tag: Google Apps Marketplace

  • Google Apps Now Lets Users Install Apps Without Admins

    Google announced on Wednesday that employees of Google Apps-using businesses and organizations can now install apps from the Google Apps Marketplace without having to involve the administrator. In the past, admins were required to install the apps , so this should save them a lot of time.

    The feature applies to Google Apps for work, Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Government.

    “Administrators can adjust the settings that filter and show which third-party apps are available to their organizations from the Admin console,” says product manager Chris Han. “By default, any user can now install apps from the Google Apps Marketplace—excluding K-12 EDU domains that are defaulted off.”

    “The Google Apps Marketplace has a wide-variety of options, no matter your taste, including Smartsheet for online project management, Freshbooks for accounting, Zoho for customer support, GQueues for to-do lists and more,” Han adds.

    Users can find and add third-party apps from the app launcher icon.

    Google is also encouraging app developers to allow end users to install their apps from the Google Apps Marketplace, and gives instructions for setting that up here.

    Image via Google

  • Google Talks Growing Customer Interest in Apps Marketplace

    On one Tuesday of each month, Google spotlights some new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. This week, it was Grockit, Elance, ERPLY, Insync, Rainmaker, Pipeline Deals, Idea2, Kashoo, SimplifyThis, Offiserv, Mindquilt, and RecMan. You can see details about these particular apps here. 

    Google has been doing a lot to promote the use of Google Apps, but the Apps Marketplace has to be one of the most significant factors, because it simply opens up a whole realm of possibilities for the use of Google Apps, just like Android or Apple’s App Store opens up new possibilities for phones. WebProNews exchanged a few words with Google Apps partner lead Scott McMullan about it.

    We asked McMullan how the apps featured in Google’s App Tuesday series have contributed to the growing interest in the marketplace itself. "Every new application brings a new capability to our customers," he says. "Some of these apps are highly specialized (e.g.Elance to find and manage an outsourced workforce) and some are very mainstream (e.g. ERPLY for managing sales)."

    "In general, more apps for Google Apps translates to more customer interest — and purchases — in the Marketplace," he adds.

    The Marketplace has over 200 installable apps that Google says are accessed by 4 million Google Apps users. The top installed app is a free social productivity, project management and task management tool called Manymoon. Here’s an intreview we did with Manymoon’s co-founder and CEO Amit Kulkarni at Google I/O earlier this yerar :

    When asked what Google is doing to encourage developers to populate the marketplace, McMullan tells us, "We are bringing them customers. B2B web application vendors are very interested in finding new ways to acquire customers at low cost, so our key value to these vendors is to bring them new customers, and new customers that are acclimated to the cloud to boot."

    On App Tuesday this week, Google introduced the first education app in the Marketplace, Grockit, which is a social learning platform for students. 

  • Nine New Apps Join Google Apps Marketplace

    Today, Google Apps users have as many as nine new reasons to be glad they’re hooked into the service.  That’s because nine new apps have been introduced to the Google Apps Marketplace, making for a substantial number of ways people can save time and streamline their work routine.

    To provide a brief summary of the apps (and their purposes): Acunote is an online project management tool.  Backupify safeguards Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Gmail, and Sites info.  DeskAway deals in project collaboration.  Form Lizzard aims to help with form completion.

    Ketera then tries to help businesspeople save money and forge new connections, and LumoFlow offers social collaboration workspaces.  The MangoSpring Collaboration Suite integrates MangoApps, RescueTime is a time management aid, and ToBeeDo is a task management service.

    That’s a pretty interesting collection.  Unfortunately, not all of the apps are free, but some free trial periods are at least available so that companies don’t have to commit their cash to ill-fitting solutions.

    On the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Harrison Shih, a member of the Google Apps Marketplace Team, also suggested, "Join us next Wednesday when we hold a live webinar to discuss with a few of the app creators on maximizing your productivity with these apps."

    The webinar’s scheduled to take place at 2 PM EDT and its formal title is "Increase productivity with new Google Apps Marketplace Apps."

  • Google Launches YouTube Channel To Showcase Apps Marketplace Additions

    Google has launched a YouTube channel for its recently released Google Apps Marketplace. The Apps marketplace is a place where developers can create apps that integrate with Google Apps and sell them to users. According to Google, they can reach over 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

    The YouTube channel should be a good place to checkout some of the apps that are available in the marketplace, and see what they can do.

    "The Apps Marketplace YouTube channel showcases videos from Marketplace vendors," says YouTube’s Chris Kelly. "Ranging from funny to informative, from cartoons to screencasts, these videos are meant to convey the benefits of extending Google Apps with integrated apps that work seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more. We’re happy to already have more than a dozen videos in the channel and over 60 integrated app vendors in the Marketplace, and look forward to more great things as the Marketplace grows."

    Here are a few sample videos:

    The Apps marketplace is still young. It was only announced a couple weeks ago. Expect it to grow significantly, and hopefully this YouTube channel will continue to make for a good destination to check out some useful apps.

  • Google Apps MarketPlace Greatly Expands Google’s Enterprise Offerings

    Last night at Campfire One, Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace, where developers can create apps that integrate with Google Apps and sell them to users. According to Google, they can reach over 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

    Right off the bat, the Google Apps Marketplace launched with over 50 applications from companies like Intuit and Atlassian, with more coming soon from companies like NetSuite and SuccessFactors, a Google spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    "Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications," explains Google Apps Marketplace Product Manager Chris Vander Mey. "With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That’s the power of the cloud."

    This is the 2nd big move by Google regarding the cloud and Google Apps in less than a week. Late last week, the company acquired DocVerse, which "makes Word, PowerPoint and Excel Work like Google Docs," as the DocVerse title tag explains.

    Developers can get more info about the Google Apps Marketplace at Google’s Developer Programs site. The company will also be talking about developing apps for the enterprise at Google I/O in May.