Company Overview William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty is a privately held, Connecticut-based real estate organization specializing in the sale of luxury homes and international property. The company regards passion, intelligence, influence as the three pillars of a successful business.
Challenge William Pitt Sotheby’s 730+ employees must always meet the demands of their affluent clients whether in the office or out in the field. In order to seamlessly migrate both contact and calendar information for an additional 65 employees, they turned to LTech to upgrade their communication platform from an outdated Exchange model to a customized solution. Their number one concern was that collaboration and communication were flawless.
LTech Solution Knowing William Pitt Sotheby’s sought a rather extensive overhaul of their communications platform, LTech crafted a specific deployment plan that considered provision while migrating existing mail and folders to a more efficient Google Apps platform. After the migration, LTech installed and configured the complete suite of Google collaboration and communication components, while also providing extensive Google Apps administration training for William Pitt Sotheby’s technical team in order to ensure a smooth transition.
With no shortage of free wi-fi service areas, the concern over accessing Google Docs without an internet connection has seemed to wane in importance. However, a year after phasing out support for offline access in Google Docs through Gears, Google has confirmed that they are readying a new and improved offline support feature for release later this year. During an interview at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Google is in the process of adding an offline access option to Google Docs that will be available this summer. Google currently uses the solution internally.
The 90-Day Appsperience Program is a low-cost, low-risk way for companies to test drive Google Apps. If an organization is interested in experiencing the productivity gains of web-powered collaboration without the commitment, LTech will manage and deploy a 90-day trial, including support and user training, for a nominal flat fee. At the end of the trial period, the organization will be able to decide how many Google Apps licenses to purchase, if any.
The Google Apps Collaboration Dashboard is now available in the Google Apps administrator control panel for Government, Education, and Business editions. The dashboard provides detailed graphs and tables that show how content is being used across your domain. Some reports emphasize user activity, while others show collaborative network trends.
Administrators can access the new dashboard on the control panel under ‘Advanced tools’, then ‘View Usage & Reports’.
Google has announced that User Managed Service will be rolled out to Google Apps accounts over the nest few days. User Managed Storage, a service that has been available to those with personal Google Accounts, will give a domain’s users the option to purchase more storage space for Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, and photos from Blogger once these products have reached the allotted storage quota.
The User Managed Storage service is enabled or disabled by the domain administrator, and the end user purchases additional storage using his or her Google Checkout account. Users can purchase between 20 GB and 1 TB of storage space for as low as $5 per year.
Two-step verification, which requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, is now available for Google Apps free edition. After a user enters their password, a verification code is sent to their mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an app to confirm that the correct user is accessing the account. This added layer of security ensures that even if someone has stolen the password, they’ll need more than that to access the account.
Google Chrome users no longer need to look at their Gmail window to see when an important messages arrives. Gmail now provides desktop notifications in the form of HTML5 pop-ups when users receive a new email or chat message.
To enable these notifications, click the Settings link in your Gmail window and scroll to the Desktop Notifications section. There you’ll be able to chose to receive notifications for new chat messages, emails, both, or other custom settings.
Google is government ready! Google Apps has released many notable updates in 2010 that makes Google Apps the premier SaaS messaging, collaboration and website ready tool for government and education enterprises.
LTech deployment services and the SecureAuth Corporation have partnered to provide rapid and secure migration and to the Google Apps environment.
On Febuary 10th, SecureAuth and LTech will discuss the joint solution to address this topic in a instructional and informative webinar.
How to set up a new Google App Domain
How to migrate users to Google Apps
How to leverage your current directory structure (AD and others) for Google Authentication
How to create a 2-Factor portal with Google and other SaaS and web sites
The webinar will feature the advanced integration skills of LTech. LTech was founded in 2001 and has evolved into a leading cloud technology integrator. As an early Google Enterprise Partner, LTech has helped dozens of customers benefit from Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance.
Space is limited so register today!
Webinar: Secure Google Apps Deployments for Government Enterprises Who: LTech and SecureAuth When: February 10th, 10am PST; 1pm EST Register
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SecureAuth is a secure Identity Enforcement Platform providing SSO and 2-Factor authentication for VPNs; Web and SaaS resources. SecurAuth is recognized a thought leader in products enabling the migration to the cloud for application and network resources.
LTech Power Panel was recently highlighted as one of CIO Insight’s ten must-have Google Apps Marketplace apps for enterprises. The article and accompanying slideshow feature resources from the Marketplace that enhance overall usability of business customers’ Google Apps installation.
According to CIO Insight, Power Panel will appeal to companies interested in increasing control over their Google Apps Integration. Power Panel is a suite of tools and most-often-requested utilities that provide security, simplify management tasks and allow business users to access data more efficiently. Features of Power Panel include role-based security, Shared Contacts Search, user life cycle management and an integration framework for CRM and enterprise data.
Productivity in Google Apps just increased ten fold. After recently adding functionality to Google Apps by allowing support for third-party applications, Google announced yesterday that they have unlocked the full gamut of Google applications to Google Apps customers. Users now have access to Blogger, Picasa, Reader, AdWords, and more. Administrators will be able to empower employees in new ways with the ability to provide different groups of users with different sets of applications.
