• To create an application, simply create a new spreadsheet.
• To create an object, simply create a new sheet.
• To add a field to an object, simply add a new column.
• To add a record to an object, simply add a new row.

As you’re doing all this, STOIC automatically creates a database (hosted by Heroku), APIs, and user interfaces. And if you want to develop a custom user interface, you can use whatever content publishing tool you’re familiar with (WordPress, Tumblr, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) and add widgets to your pages for quickly creating forms and lists that are directly connected to your database. It’s that easy.

STOIC is also integrated with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Drive, allowing collaborative workflows to be implemented on top of Google Apps.

Register for updates on STOIC on their website.

Unisys concluded that the use of two-factor authentication met these standards, enabling federal workers to access their email and data outside of the government’s network. This is part of an effort to save $3bn in the next five years by eliminating around 800 federal data centers.

Read the entire article here.

Currently there are support forums and bulletin boards available for users of their free products and 24/7 phone support for users of Google Premier, although this only covers critical problems that prevent access to the system.

Network World reports that Google enterprise chief Dave Girouard is about to change all this with the advent of 24/7 phone-based support. “It’s not realistic for us to ever have 24/7 phone for a free service,” says Girouard. “But for paid services, you should be able to call us at any time for any problem, period, full stop. And we’re working toward that.”

If Google is able to upgrade their phone-based support to match the quality of enterprise competitors such as Microsoft, it will represent a major step towards making Google Apps a realistic alternative for companies that rely heavily on a well-defined support methodology.

PC World’s Tony Bradley is currently on day 22 of a challenge to use Google Apps in place of Microsoft Office for a full 30 days.

Bradley’s series of articles touches on a number of topics that are central to the Google Apps experience. Rather than looking at the platform as a free or cheap alternative to Microsoft Office, it really offers an alternative way to share and collaborate while representing a large percent of Office features that most commonly used.

Among some of my favorite of his pieces in last three weeks include:

• How to manage when the cloud or internet is unavailable.
• Some of the new Chrome extensions for Google Docs.
• The “wow” experience of collaborating with Google Docs.
• Uploading folders to Google’s cloud-based file service.
• The power of the lesser-known forms and surveys function in Google spreadsheets.

His experience with Google Apps hasn’t been seamless or without problems – there are certainly a variety of power user options that have no counterpart in the cloud. But it’s interesting reading to see how a desktop specialist has transitioned to Google and to hear of the pros and cons.

This is the first time Google has provided a detailed video illustrating some of the lengthy measures taken to provide the multiple levels of security taken to protect customer data.

Additionally, Google previously released a Security Whitepaper  on Google Apps Messaging and Collaboration Products which provides some insight into their security process.

There are two great tools that can help achieve these seamlessly. Both show the file system in your Google Apps account whenever you use the the file dialog (from opening or saving files from Office).

Gladinet: Gladinet integrates with a range of different cloud services, Google Apps included and is one of the more mature pieces of middle-ware to do this. If you choose to pay beyond the trial, Google Apps Express readers receive 10% off the license with the code GOOGTLKJ76. There is also a free version available that’s more suitable to individuals wanting to synchronize with their personal Google Apps accounts.

DocsInOffice.com: this is a new software offering from Germany that doesn’t require any add-ons or additional plugins. Once you have signed up for an account, just enter http://docsinoffice.com/gdocs in the file dialog and you will be immediately linked to your files in the Google cloud. There’s a video tutorial of the process available on YouTube but it’s remarkably simple to set up and use.

I find both of these solutions more intuitive than Google Cloud Connect, which doesn’t solve the problem in such an elegant way. It’s comforting to know that when I end up using Microsoft Office applications that the files are securely backed up with my other Google Apps content.

Note that files stored in Google Apps using these methods are counted against your storage quota whereas files created in Google Apps don’t (you can store as many of these as you like).

Here are some of the changes that have been rolled out during the last week:

• Administrators now have the ability to control if users are allowed to install Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office.
• Two labs features in Gmail are graduating to the standard application. These help prevent missing a person on an email (this is achieved by looking at groups of people you regularly email together) and an additional check to make sure you have the right person when two or more contacts have similar names.
• Users can select their own background in Gmail – select “Create your own themes” from the Themes tab in Settings.
• The Google Docs word processor now paginates documents, meaning that you can see the page breaks that will occur when printing. This feature can be toggled from the View menu.

Although these are minor changes, it shows how the Google Apps team continues to address user requests for changes in the product.

Google has also released a sub-site called What’s New in Google Apps? which provides some insight into the release track for upcoming changes on the platform.

Google has just announced a series of changes designed to woo the favor of corporations concerned about security on mobile devices:

• Security: You can now secure a phone running Android 2.2 or later remotely by locating it on the map and sending instructions to reset the password or obliterate the data on the device.
• Encryption: Data on the phone can be encrypted by Google Apps administrators to effectively secure it against users without the necessary credentials.
• Phone Book: The Google Apps Lookup option becomes a corporate directory, making it unnecessary to build separate intranet lookup sites.

Although Android has a significant way to go to overtake Blackberry in the corporate market, these changes show their desire to allay the fears of enterprise network and security professionals, while providing features to make Google Apps Administrators’ lives easier.

For more information on the latest Android developments, see Android and Me.

• A change to the way contacts save new information: currently, Gmail will automatically add email addresses from senders not in your contact list. While this may seem sensible, it tends to cause the contacts list to become saturated with the email addresses of senders you have least contact with. The new changes mean that if you want to retain a smaller (and arguably more valuable) list of contacts, just change the setting.
• When changing or editing filters, you will now be redirected back to where you were before starting the filter-related task.
• “Refresh” is now more prominent – many users refresh the entire browser window when they want to check for new mail. Although you don’t need to this, since clicking a label or the Refresh hyperlink will poll for new messages, it’s now a more obvious option as the hyperlink has been changed to a default button.
• If you make a typo in an email address, Gmail will now indicate the problematic address rather than just declaring that one of the addresses is bad. This won’t make any difference for emails sent to a single user, but makes life easier when you send to several recipients simultaneously.
• Making error pop-ups less intrusive – these appear at the the top of the screen as a notification, rather than a dialog that the user must click through.

For a full list of these changes, see the Gmail blog post on this topic. The blog also encourages users to submit suggestions for improvements. These changes are being deployed to standalone Gmail accounts and will appear on the enterprise upgrade track shortly.

Key background points from this article:

• Google Apps currently has a very small share of the enterprise market, but a much bigger share in education and government organizations, principally because of budget cuts and the need to do more with less.
• Both organizations’ IT directors said that, learning curves aside, they had no regrets about moving to Google Apps.
• One IT director was a happy Gmail user who wanted better mobility for city workers, who were bogged down by having to log in through Cisco VPN clients to check Lotus Notes.

The City of Panama, Florida discovered a tool called CloudLock that provided advanced user provisioning and reporting features. The American Lung Association used the same tool to fill a gap: “You have the ability to share documents internally and with the public, but no real way to monitor those documents,” said their Director of Data and Technology, Eric McDuffee. CloudLock costs $2-4 per user per year, on top of the Google Apps Premier cost of $50 per corporate user (free for educational and non-profit users up to 3,000 people).

The interesting part about these two organizations is that they both identified similar problems with document and sharing controls in Google Apps, and used a third-party solution to not only address the issue but find a better solution than a traditional file server alternative. This once again shows that the Google Marketplace eco-system is starting to yield some enterprise-ready tools to augment Google’s standard offering.

For more details, read the entire article at CIO.com.