Recently we received the below email from the Google Apps team indicating that any Google Docs that are publicly published will now be indexed by Google’s search engine, making the data inside them visible to anyone. At first, we were very concerned about this change and the possibility of confidential data being published. However, after following the extremely easy instructions, we’re now confident that our data and the data of our clients is still as secure as ever. I am curious how much confidential data at other companies will now be searchable and how much of that data will be real vs that which people purposely publish for marketing purposes.

Here’s the email:

Hello Google Apps admin,

We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.

If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to ’share documents outside the domain’ without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:

- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option ‘Users can publish documents to the public internet’

If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:

- Go to the ‘Share tab’
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose ‘Publish as web page’. For presentations choose ‘Publish/embed’
- Click on the button that says ‘Stop publishing’

For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781

This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

In our current economic climate, it’s critical to assess your internal business processes from time to time, and evaluate how to reduce costs while still increasing productivity and efficiency.  In addition to deploying CRM solutions like salesforce.com to accomplish this feat, many companies big and small have begun using Google Apps for their productivity and messaging needs.  Google Apps enables employees to stay connected through messaging apps like Google Calendar and Gmail, which includes voice, video, and IM capabilities.  It also increases productivity and facilitates the sharing of company information through collaboration apps like Google Docs, Google Video, and Google Sites.  Check out the Google Apps site for more information on the rich set of features included with Google Apps.

At $50 per user for a year, Google’s Premier Edition for businesses offers an affordable solution to organizations of all sizes.  Furthermore, its web-based platform eliminates the need for businesses to spend exorbitantly on hardware, software, and ongoing maintenance.  As part of their longtime partnership, Google and salesforce.com have developed Salesforce for Google Apps, integrating the two applications and allowing you to access Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs all from within Salesforce.  For all of these reasons, many larger corporations have begun adopting Google Apps internally.  At MK Partners, we use it in conjunction with salesforce.com quite extensively, enabling us to stay connected all the time and share key information with each other easily.

For more information on implementing Google Apps within your organization and syncing it with salesforce.com, contact us at sales@mkpartners.com.