Last week, I attended the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit West in Los Angeles. I enjoyed the opportunity to hear from industry leaders and thinkers and connect with CIOs and senior IT leaders from a wide variety of companies and industries. The hot topic of the conference? Cloud computing and how it can drive innovation. Several speakers touched upon using the latest Internet technologies to accelerate business results.

We recently shared an update on the Google Apps Blog about new features in Google Sites , the web creation and publishing application included in Google Apps . The new features let you copy your site, use more options to search, and more easily announce updates. Since these features are useful for anyone who uses Google Sites as part of the Google Apps Premier or Education editions, we wanted to make it easy for you to read about the features . Posted by Ellen Leanse,

Editor's note: John Matthews is Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Director, Office of the President, for JohnsonDiversey . The company is a global provider of commercial cleaning, sanitation and hygiene solutions and serves customers in the lodging, food service, retail, health care, and food and beverage sectors. One of four companies founded by the Johnson Family, JohnsonDiversey is located in Located in Racine,

Editor's note: Brent Hoag is Senior Director, IT for JohnsonDiversey , formed when Johnson Wax Professional acquired DiverseyLever. Its focus is on providing products to commercial businesses for food safety, housekeeping, and industrial cleaning. Throughout its history, the company has been dedicated to leadership in environmental issues, health, and safety. Please join Brent and members of the Google Enterprise team for a live webcast this Thursday, September 17,

Editor's note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Carole Jett, Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture has taken the lead on making detailed state-by-state information about stimulus spending available to the public via an interactive Google Map. The map makes it easy for people to find information about stimulus projects in their part of the country by department, program, or dollar amount. In May 2009,

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Bill Kelly, Chief Information Officer for Duralee, a fast-growing decorative fabrics company. With more than 25,000 SKUs, the company caters to interior designers throughout the world. Headquartered in Bay Shore, New York, Duralee has more than 400 employees and dozens of corporate and designer showrooms. Duralee recently chose Google Apps as their email platform,

In my work, being able to communicate and collaborate with many groups of people is crucial to productivity, and I often want to use Google Apps to share content with particular groups or teams. Typing in every user's email address manually is painstaking and inefficient, and remembering when people leave and join different teams is impossible. Like any user, I want to make sure that I reach the right people, and I want this to be easy and and efficient. With that in mind,

Editor's note: Last Friday marked the third anniversary of the release of Virtual Alabama, an innovative information-sharing program in the state of Alabama. Built upon Google Earth Enterprise, Virtual Alabama has become a true leader in promoting collaboration among the different agencies that fulfill government's many roles â€" from disaster preparedness and response to the environment, from education to economic development, and much more. We invited Chris Johnson,

Editor's note: We're pleased to welcome Bryan MacDonald, Chief Technology Officer at the School Systems group of Pearson â€" an international media company specializing in education, business information, and consumer publishing â€" as our guest blogger today. Pearson has integrated Google Maps API Premier into their flagship student information systems, PowerSchool® Premier and Chancery® SMS. With Google Maps,

We view Google Apps for Education as both a product and a platform. That's why we work hard to open up lots of integration points, letting our tools interact with other systems used by our Education customers . For example, we've supported work that has integrated Google Apps into environments such as Moodle . We also share a large number of APIs to allow integration into our user management system, and many of our individual apps like Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Ron Brister, Senior Manager of Global IT Operations, and Arron Privatsky, System Administrator, of Serena Software as our guest bloggers today. Serena Software, a leading provider of software to accelerate application development, helps IT departments keep pace with the demands of the businesses they support.

We're usually very serious when we describe our take on cloud computing , but on Wednesday, June 24, we'll be letting our hair down and having fun with computing in the cloud. We've teamed up with Virgin America to launch the Day in the Cloud Challenge â€" the first-ever online scavenger hunt to be played simultaneously in the air and on the ground. If you fly for business or for pleasure, you've probably noticed that more and more airlines are rolling out in-flight WiFi,

On this blog, we usually focus on helping you make the most of the products we've designed specifically with IT departments in mind. But Google has lots of other tools that other parts of your organization )such as the sales and marketing teams( might find useful. So, in this post, we thought we'd go through a quick summary of the wide range of Google products that can help you do business. We've grouped these tips into three buckets: methods to optimize your website,

If your enterprise maintains one or more physical locations, you may already know that roughly 80% of consumers use search to find local businesses . But unless those customers are also visiting your website directly, you may not know much about how those customers are finding you, or where they're coming from when they visit one of your locations. That's because your site is just a part of your entire web presence. Users of Google Maps and Google Search, for example,

More than 3,000 businesses adopt Google Apps every day. They range from ten-person companies who switch in a few hours to large companies and universities that plan their move from on-premises servers over weeks and months. Ensuring a smooth change is a big priority for us, and we're making the transition a little easier for mobile users. We're pleased to announce the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry ® Enterprise Server .

I was among a team of Googlers who recently attended the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit in Miami, Florida. We enjoyed the sunshine, industry speakers, and above all the chance to talk with CIOs and IT leads from companies across a range of industries. Given the economy, the cost savings available through Google Apps gained a lot of interest. But we probably got the most "oohs" and " aahs " when we demoed our collaboration apps )Google Docs,

If you've ever checked out the nearest store with Trek bikes , planned a trip to a Crowne Plaza Hotel , or looked for the best local anything on Yelp , you know that many businesses use Google Maps to help people find where they're located. Maps can be deployed within your organization to help your employees make fast, informed decisions â€" such as assessing the location and performance efficiency of your vehicles and other mobile assets.

Listening to Google Apps admins talk â€" with us and with each other â€" made it clear: as IT professionals, admins wanted a way to connect online somewhere in the Google environment. We heard a clear call for a gathering place, or community â€" a meeting point where admins could meet one another, identify each other by business type or geography, discuss topics unique to their roles, and share learning and best practices in a way that helped in their professional roles.

Today we're excited to announce a little something to bring some flair to people's Gmail accounts for all editions of Google Apps . Google Apps now offers more than 30 Gmail account theme choices ranging from weather themes that are customized for your location, to nature themes that change with your timezone, to themes that are just plain fun and funky. Themes in Gmail give you a chance to customize your inbox,

Recent commentary on channel growth around cloud computing and the emerging business scenarios for trusted IT advisors are good examples the growing momentum around the ecosystem of channel partners like consultants, resellers and developers pursuing new models for doing business in the cloud. We're excited to share details of what we're seeing and are we're pleased to offer two ways to learn more about the benefits of cloud computing: For solutions providers, developers,