Google Apps goes global
Posted by Sanjay Raman, Google Apps
Product Manager
Our mission is to "organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible
and useful." Note that twice in this eleven-word mission
statement, we mention that this is a global effort, not just a
problem we're solving only for English-speaking users in the
U.S. That global focus is critical, because fully 65% of Internet
users around the world speak a language other than English. In
fact, the Internet's top 10 languages still only account for
around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200
million people.
As part of our broader effort to make Google accessible to more
people in their native languages, we're announcing a number of
updates for
>Google Apps, our customizable package of
hosted communication and collaboration
href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/user_features.html"
>applications for businesses, schools, and
other organizations. Several features and components previously
available only to English users and administrators of Google Apps
are now available in other languages, too. Here's a quick
rundown of what's new for non-English speakers:
Google Apps
href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html"
>Premier Edition for companies and
organizations needing an uptime guarantee for email service, 10
gigabytes of email storage per user,
href="http://code.google.com/apis/apps/"
>integration APIs and multi-lingual
telephone support for critical issues (support experts are
available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch).
Also, for a limited time, you can try Premier Edition for free for
30 days.
Google Apps
>Partner Edition for ISPs and portals
that want to offer Gmail and other applications to their
subscribers.
Google
href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/dands.html"
>Docs & Spreadsheets, which
lets Google Apps users create and collaborate in real time, right
from their browsers.
The
href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/start_page.html"
>Start Page, a central place for Google Apps
users to preview their inboxes, calendars and documents, access
their organizations' essential content, and search the
web.
A more user-friendly
href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/control_panel.html"
>control panel interface for Google Apps
administrators.
href="http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=61369"
>Mail migration tools for
administrators who want to switch from a different email system
(available with Premier and Education Editions only).
Not only are we adding these features to the languages Google Apps
already supports; we're also rolling Google Apps out in six
more languages. Here's the full list:
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=fr" >French,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=it" >Italian,
German,
>Spanish,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=nl" >Dutch,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=sv" >Swedish,
>Norwegian,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=da" >Danish,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=fi" >Finnish,
>Turkish,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=pl" >Polish,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=uk"
>Ukrainian,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=cs" >Czech,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ru" >Russian,
>Chinese (Simplified),
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=zh_TW"
>Chinese (Traditional),
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ja"
>Japanese,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ko" >Korean,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=pt_BR"
>Brazilian Portuguese,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=th" >Thai,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=vi"
>Vietnamese,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=ar" >Arabic,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=iw" >Hebrew,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=id"
>Indonesian,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=hu"
>Hungarian,
href="http://www.google.com/a/?hl=en_GB" >UK
English and
>US English.
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Tags: , Apps, google, ManagerOur, Posted, product, Raman, Sanjay