With over 400 million users, Google+ is an up and coming social melting pot waiting for you to unleash your secret weapon: your business information. This social media tool can help you attract new customers and strengthen your relationship with existing ones. And just in case you didn’t know, if a lead happens to run a search with keywords that match your business’ description in Google’s famous search engine and your business happens to have a business page listed on Google+, your page will organically be listed as a search result. Enough said. Let’s set your business up:

Enabling Google+ Premium Features

To ensure that you are using Google+ at its maximum capacity you will first need to enable the Premium Features in your Google Apps Dashboard. This gives you access to features such as Google Hangout, a tool that allow you to place face-to-face video calls with up to nine other people. To enable these features please log in to your Google Apps admin control panel at admin.google.com and navigate to your Google+ Settings (under Settings) to click on the Preview Premium Features button.

Enabling Hangouts

Once you’ve enabled the premium features in your Google Apps control panel you should get access to enabling Hangouts for your domain by going to your Settings > Talk (in the new control panel Google Apps > Settings for Talk > Advanced Settings) and enable feature under Enable the new Hangouts for messaging and video calls.

IMPORTANT: Google warns that “Domains that have opted-in to Google+ Hangouts cannot purchase Google Apps Vault and your customers should not opt in if they plan to purchase Vault. Domains that have purchased Vault or are under data location restrictions will not be able to opt-in.”

Creating a Google+ Business Page

In order to create such a page you need to make sure you have an individual Google+ profile page first. Once you have one you can move forward with the business page. Go to Pages and click Create a Page.

Select a Category for your business/product from the following options:

 

Final Thoughts

Using Google+ to grow your business makes sense because it integrates very seamlessly with all of your other Google products such as Google Apps (not only can you share links from your Gmail inbox but you can also create a calendar event from Google Calendar that generates a Hangout session to be shared with guests) and the aforementioned Google AdWords. The fact that you are being listed in Google searches alone is a good enough reason for you to create your Google+ Business page and maintain it to develop long-lasting relationships with your customers and partners. Now is the time for change and you can’t go wrong with this marketing opportunity.

Google is making big changes to the way your Google Apps data is managed.  Rolling out in the coming weeks, Google will be moving to a unified storage model. Up until now, Gmail and Drive have maintained separate quotas (25 gigs for email, 5 gigs for docs). With the level of integration between the core apps continually expanding, consolidation of data seems to be the next logical step forward.

How it will work

Google Apps will now be comprised of 30 gigs of unified storage that can be used in any area (Gmail, Drive, Picasa, G+). The big thing here is that this means inboxes are no longer capped at 25 gigs! Previously, many users that would hit the 25 gig limit were forced to delete large portions of their messages or migrate data to a backup account.

Google is also making changes to the Drive Storage page to help clarify usage data and upgrade options.

Take a look at Google’s Official Enterprise Blog for more details.

-Koosha Araghi

Image Credits: Image 1, Image 2 

Our President travels more than anyone else in the company. Every time I see him, there is a good possibility he’s either come back from a week long conference or a dozen back-to-back meet and greets. Of course that also means he has a fresh stack of business cards, riddled with quick notes that ultimately get scattered and lost in the tabletop abyss. This seems to be a common theme I’ve noticed in the business world that our friends at Zoho are looking to solve.

Zoho released an iPhone app recently called Card Scanner. Its purpose is to help individuals organize business cards in an easy to use scanning app that integrates directly with their CRM. Unlike other mobile apps by Zoho, this is standalone and does not require maintaining/creating a Zoho account.

The app itself really is as straightforward as the name implies. It consists of a clean, minimalistic style that’s very snappy and responsive. You’re given two basic options when you start, Scan Business Card and Contacts. Selecting the scan option opens up an internal camera app that allows you to snap a shot of the card in question and allow the built in OCR (optical character recognition) technology do its magic.

I made an effort to test the limits of the app by taking the pictures while holding the card in the air in low light situations as opposed to flat on a desk in an office setting. For my experiment, I used three different styles of business cards, our COO’s, my barber, and a friends plumbing business.

Despite the differences between the cards (especially the last one given its darker styling and nonstandard formatting), all the vital information was picked up (name, company, phone, addresses, email address) successfully. The only problem I had was with the small, light grey tagline (move your company to the cloud) on our COO’s card. Even in that low light situation with the faint tagline, it still managed to pick up most of the sentence.

Once captured, you can review the content, make any revisions and save it as a contact. I mentioned earlier that this integrates with Zoho’s CRM but it also works as a standalone app. For those of you currently on the Zoho platform, you can take advantage of the apps quick capture in sending the info to the CRM as either a contact or a lead. For non-CRM users or those that don’t want to integrate the two, the app also provides onboard rolodex functionality.

Conclusion

Simply put, this is a clean, easy to use program that serves its purpose well. One feature I’d really like to see added is the ability to add notes to the contact within the app. If you send the captured card to Zoho, you will have the ability to add notes but it does require you to access the CRM separately.

Card Scanner can be found on the appstore for $4.99. For those of you looking to attend even a single conference or business meeting, this app definitely pays for itself for less than the cost of your espresso.

-Koosha Araghi

The focus of Bence’s talk will be on getting the most out of integrating Zoho CRM with the Google Apps platform.

Die-hard Outlook folk, this one’s for you. We run into a lot of organizations eager to take advantage of all the great features of the Google ecosystem but dreading the idea of dropping their longtime friend. Today I’d like to highlight a few ways to make the transition from Outlook to the Gmail platform easier both visually and functionally.

The picture above shows the standard Google inbox. You have a list of your different folders on the left and your messages in the main view. The Outlook standard has always been a vertically divided format where folders reside on the left, a list of the messages right next to it and the selected email displaying on the right.

Source: microsoft.com

Fortunately Google released a lab (labs are experimental features found in the gmail settings) called window pane to bring a similar look to Gmail.

Enabling Window Pane Mode:

1.  Go to the settings (located in the gear icon in the top right of your screen)
   
2. Select the Labs tab
3. Scroll down until you see Preview Pane
4. Click on the enable button to the right
   
5. Scroll down and click save
6. When you return to your inbox, a toggle split pane button will show up.
   
7. Click on the arrow next to the split pane button and select vertical split.

Now your inbox should look a little something like this:

Disabling Conversation View:

By default, conversation view is also enabled which groups any replies back and forth containing the same subject line. The latest versions of Outlook support a threaded view like this but from our experience most users choose to have every message separated.

1. Go to settings (by clicking on the gear icon to the top right of your inbox)
2. Scroll down to conversation view and turn it off
   
3. Click save and return to a thread-less inbox.

Filters, Rules and Labels:

Gmail’s folder system is a bit different than that of the Outlook realm. In Gmail they’re called labels and can offer a similar type of organizational structural (with nested folders and more). Rules in Gmail are simply called filters. With the Google engine running the show, you can seamlessly make advanced searches that can automatically be filtered into specific labels.

• To create labels, take a look at this quick tutorial on Google’s support page:
  Using Labels
• Google also has a page listing the simple process of creating filters.
  Using Filters
• For more advanced searches (that can be used in filters or general searches):
  Advanced Search

Offline Gmail:

If you use the Chrome browser, Google has also released an offline version of Gmail. To enable the extension, visit the chrome store and click Add to Chrome.
Gmail Offline

-Koosha Araghi