Google picks up electronic stored information legal expert for Apps unit

Jack Halprin, currently lists his employer as Autonomy where he was the Vice President, eDiscovery and Compliance.

But we’ve heard from a source in the know that he’s made a move to Google and will be in charge of Google’s management of electronically stored information (ESI) for both legal and information governance purposes in their Apps/Postini wing.  His background includes “managing social media for legal and governance purposes, defensible processes for managing discovery, proportionality, and the reduction of eDiscovery costs” –which will certainly help Google prepare companies who are moving infrastructure into Google’s Cloud offerings.

This follows Google’s Enterprise’s pickup of Matthew Eichner, who now manages Global Enterprise Search, earlier this year.

Halprin provides the following background in his Linked in Profile: Read more

Google Plus updated with iPad and iPod touch support

Google has just pushed an update for the official Google+ app for iOS, bringing with it support for iPad and iPod touch, two devices the app was previously unavailable for, among a few other features including aggregated circle add notifications, huddle settings, and the usual “Performance and stability improvements”.

You should be able to update the app now via the App Store or swing by iTunes and grab the new version now. We’ll keep you posted with any other discoveries we might make in this latest update.

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Google Docs redesigned: here’s how to enable it

While it hasn’t officially been announced, Google Operating System has discovered how to enable the new design for Google Docs. The new design matches the Google+ design we’ve seen Google enabling across all products over the last month — adding more whitespace and new colors. To enable, all you have to do is select “enable new look” below the settings icon in the Google+ bar (shown after the break).

Along with the new design are five new keyboard shortcuts: up and down arrows will highlight documents to open, shift + T creates a new text document, shift + S creates a new spreadsheet, shift + C creates a new collection, and ”?” opens the shortcut guide. If the new design isn’t for you, you can enable the old theme back, but we don’t think you’ll want to change. Check out a few more screenshots after the break.

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Google adds tablet-like preview panes to Gmail inbox

If you have ever used Gmail on a tablet, you’ve probably appreciated the improvements made to the mobile UI and missed them when forced to use Gmail from your desktop browser. Luckily, Google just introduced a new preview pane feature for Gmail that allows you to quickly view snippets of messages, much like the mobile interface currently accessible on tablets (which, yes, dates from Outlook 2003 – thanks commenters).

You can enable the feature by turning it on from the Labs tab in your Gmail settings and switching between views via a new toggle button in the upper right corner of your inbox.

You can also move the preview pane below your message list if you have limited screen real
estate.
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You can now rate Google translations and add templates to Contacts

Two nice-to-haves discovered earlier this week over at the Google Operating System blog. The first deals with using templates in Google Contacts. You can choose between two templates by hitting the More Actions button when creating a new contact: Standard and Business. The latter has added custom fields such as job title, company name, mobile phone and work phone. Hopefully, Google will allow us to edit and create our own templates in the future.

The other feature available in the Google Translate service seeks to tap the crowd-sourced knowledge in order to improve the quality of translations. From now on, you can mark each individual translation as Helpful, Not helpful and Offensive by clicking the Rate Translation button. Also, you can click on the translated word and up pops a menu with alternate translations that you can re-order by holding down the Shift key and drag the words around.

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Gmail for mobile updated with pull down to refresh and transitions

Google has announced an update to their Gmail for mobile website. The updates are pretty minor, but we’re grateful for them nonetheless. First off, you can now pull down the message list to refresh your inbox (iOS and Blackberry PlayBook).

Google also included two minor updates: high-res icons and transitions. The high-res icons are pretty, as seen after the break. Lastly, transitions will take place when you tap on a conversation, tap back to the inbox, go to the menu or go back, the view will slide left or right. Check out a few press shots after the break.

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