Google, in recent years, has added enterprise features to Android to increase adoption by businesses. The latest is called “zero-touch enrollment” and allows companies to configure devices with preferences at the carrier level before employees even receive them.
Over the past few months, Google has rolled out several new features powered by machine learning. Announced at an enterprise event today, Google Springboard allows users to search through Google Apps and acts as a day-to-day work assistant, providing “useful and actionable information and recommendations.” The company also announced a major revamp to Google Sites.
One day after announcing availability of its Vive VR headset for consumers following a few delays, HTC today announced an enterprise edition of the product.
Chromebox for meetings were announced two years ago and introduced the constantly updating Chrome OS model to corporate video conferencing. Previous hardware included a Chromebox and a camera, but required companies to supply their own monitor. Today, Google is announcing a more complete package that features an all-in-one Acer Chromebase that runs the enterprise software.
Update: It appears Google has shut down the eBay listing.
Earlier this year, we told you across several exclusive reports that second-generation Glass hardware was in development, namely a variant of the device reworked with the enterprise in mind. Now, a couple months after getting our first look at FCC images of the device and later an official Google patent, we now have our first look at a unit in the wild via a new eBay listing…
In November of last year, Google announced they were combining their various cloud and enterprise products into one team headed by Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMWare. Greene was brought over after Google purchased her cloud platform startup Bebop for $380 million, as revealed in an SEC filing today.
Sundar Pichai has taken to the Google for Work blog today to announce that Diane Greene, co-founder of VMWare, is taking lead of a newly-organized group at Google that combines the company’s cloud businesses. Besides the obvious Google Cloud Platform, this move pulls in Google for Work and Google Apps to make one integrated team…
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Chromebook for Work is Google’s lineup of premium Chrome OS-powered laptops which it promotes as easy to deploy, highly secure, and ready to run legacy Window applications through OS virtualization. Today the company announced that Dell will begin selling a new one of these business-ready Chromebooks starting September 17th, called the Dell Chromebook 13.
The Chromebook 13 is, like the rest of the Chromebook for Work line, packing a serious punch for a computer running such a lightweight operating system. It has a 13.3″ full HD touchscreen display (1920×1080), a 5th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, a backlit keyboard and glass touchpad, and a palmrest made out of magnesium alloy. The laptop is quoted for 12 hours of battery life, although these ratings are usually generous. The starting price will be $399 when it goes on sale, with no more detail on upgrade options or variants. “Enterprise class performance at an economical price point,” Google says in its blog post.
Chrome OS certainly does hold a lot of promise for IT departments frustrated with the current solutions out there, namely Windows and all the tumult going on at Microsoft over the company’s strategy for the operating system going forward. Google’s operating system was built at a much later time, and without the baggage of years and years of developing and supporting software meant for a place and time that has since passed. In my day-to-day there are rarely more than a few edge case applications and tools I need a full-on desktop computer for, so the ability of Chrome OS to virtualize Windows and run its applications is just icing on the cake of an OS which recognizes that many business-related programs can run in the web and be almost indistinguishable from their desktop equivalents — especially with Chrome OS’s ability to run web apps as individual windowed apps.
The internet got more than a little excited about BlackBerry buying up a couple of Android-related domains a few weeks ago. Although they came at a time when rumors of an Android-powered BlackBerry smartphone were floating around, turns out they’re nothing to do with that. As was always the more likely scenario, BlackBerry has used these domains to show us how it keeps our Android phones secure through its BES12 enterprise management system.
In a blog post today, BlackBerry has announced Android Secured, a dedicated web space for keeping customers up to date on the management and security of Android phones. The new Android Secured hub can be found at www.manageandroid.com.
To that end we’ve recently launched the Android Secured hub for fresh news and updates on all things Android security and Android management. Check it out and be sure to visit again soon as we curate the top articles and stories that will keep you on the cutting edge.
From just skimming over it quickly, it appears to be a collation of various articles and videos from across the web which BlackBerry thinks is important to share with its enterprise customers. There is some BlackBerry-created content too, like an eBook on enterprise mobile security (for example). This is undoubtedly a push to reaffirm the company’s relevance in a market where so many people now want to bring their own phones to work. And where companies don’t necessarily want to fork out for an iPhone.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t see a BlackBerry Android device. The manufacturer’s own chief, John Chen said the company might as long as they can make it secure. What’s more, there have been supposed leaks of a BlackBerry ‘Venice’ portrait-slider which may or may not be on its way.
Google Glass Explorer Edition
We told you last week that Google is internally referring to its next iteration of Google Glass as “Enterprise Edition” or “EE,” and now we’ve uncovered information about the soon-to-be-launched device’s hardware. According to several sources familiar with advanced prototypes of the device, the Enterprise Edition includes a larger prism display, as well as an Intel Atom processor that brings better performance and moderately improved battery life…
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First noticed by Florian Kiersch on Google+, Google appears to be testing a new meetings service. Google Meetings, also referred to as GMeet, appears to allow users to schedule and join teleconference calls with one click. Instead of having to dial into a teleconference call, one user could create a meeting topic in GMeet, then invite everyone else to the call. People who received an invite would be able to then join the call with a single click.
Fresh off their landmark deal with Apple, IBM reports that around 60% of the leading Android dating apps include vulnerabilities that risk both personal and corporate data.
The report, which didn’t examine the iOS counterparts of any dating apps, found that 60% of the apps it examined included vulnerabilities that allow for either malware, the ability to track a user via GPS or the device’s microphone or camera, or steal credit card information.
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Amazon Web Services is launching a new service (via The Wall Street Journal) this morning called “WorkMail,” an enterprise email and calendar solution that the Seattle-based company believes will bring a wide variety of improvements to a space that is largely controlled by Microsoft and Google.
Dropbox today officially announced its Dropbox for Business API allowing corporate IT systems to integrate the cloud-syncing platform for businesses into their own solutions. Dropbox says its newly announced Business API (application programming interface) will let developers take advantage of “team-level functionality” and corporate partners to further integrate Dropbox for Business into their own systems. Specifically, the Dropbox for Business API will provide the following benefits for partners:
Google, in a post on the official Google Work blog today, announced several enhancements coming to enterprise Chromebook users. In addition to a slew of new features for places using Chromebooks for Work, Google also announced a new pricing scheme for enterprise users. For $50 per device per year, users can get access to all of Google’s Chromebook for Work features, although that only applies to customers in the United States and Canada.
Google on Tuesday announced the rebranding of its Enterprise products and services group to a friendlier “Google for Work” name that should resonate better with small businesses and anyone using Google services, such as Maps, Search, Chrome, Android and Cloud Platform, to perform their day-to-day work. Google chairman Eric Schmidt emphasized that the change was made to empower anyone, including a sole developer in his or her basement, to have an impact.
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A new report from The Information claims Google and HP have discussed the possibility of bringing a Google Now-like Android assistant to the workplace. Google’s Android unit has also reportedly been in talks with others about the functionality:
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The latest enterprise market share data from Good Technology shows that Android gained five points from iOS, hitting almost a third of the market at 32 percent while iOS fell from 72 to 67 percent. Windows Phone remains flat (and irrelevant) at just 1 percent. (BlackBerry data is not included as the company uses its own servers and activations are invisible to Good Technology.)
What’s particularly impressive about the numbers is that Good’s technology mostly connects mobile devices to Exchange servers and organizations that use Google services for enterprise, which are more likely to Android, aren’t being counted here…
Sprint and Google announced a partnership today that will see the carrier sell Apps for Business, Google’s productivity suite of products for enterprise, while offering deployment and support as a complete solution. Sprint is essentially becoming a reseller as part of the Google Apps Partner Program.
“Google Apps helps businesses work better together with familiar tools they can trust,” said Murali Sitaram, director of strategic partnerships for Google Enterprise. “Our partners are critical in this effort, providing valuable cloud and mobility solutions to customers of all sizes and across diverse industries. We are pleased to welcome Sprint to the Google Apps Partner Program, where they will provide Google Apps and added services to help customers work the way they live.”
In its press release, Sprint said its offering of Google Apps for Business will include “24/7 support and online training included at no charge … all with a mobile-centric approach that enables the use of Google Apps on mobile devices.”
Google has announced a new feature for enterprise users of Google Apps: the ability for assistants and other team members to search for particular people in their boss’s contacts list.
Contacts delegation allows enterprise users to delegate full access to the contacts in their “My Contacts” group without granting access to their mail or anything else in their accounts. […]
To save users time when locating specific delegated contacts, we’ve now added search functionality. Delegates can search delegator contacts by selecting the delegator contact group in the navigation pane, and then searching.
It’s not the most exciting of new features, but is one of those small things that can make a worthwhile difference to a PA who might have to contact a dozen or more people a day – and every improvement like that helps Google build its case for broader enterprise adoption of Google Apps.
During its annual developer conference today, Google announced several new enterprise features that are coming to Android with its “L” update and a new “Android for Work” program. Thanks to a plethora of new APIs, the “L” version of Android will be able to seamlessly unify personal and business apps and data. Google claims that currently, many employees are required to carry two phones: one for work and one for personal use.
Google I/O is literally hours away and while we expect to see several things at this year’s conference, one of Mountain View’s biggest talking points could be improving Android’s appeal to business customers. To accomplish this, Google’s head of Android, Sundar Pichai is in talks with companies like Qualcomm to develop chips that store confidential information such as passwords and user data, so they won’t be as vulnerable to hackers, according to The Information.
Whether you’re an average Joe backing up pictures of your family or a huge mega-corporation that regularly moves terabytes of data, cloud storage migration can be a bit of a pain. Aware of your plight, Google is developing a solution that will help enterprise customers move their precious information with less of a fuss. Today, the company announced a limited preview of its new cloud import tool, which makes it “faster, easier and cheaper” to import your cloud storage buckets through Google’s “high performance network.”
Google recently expanded its Apps services for enterprise users by making its premium communication features available to everyone. Apps customers can now broadcast a 15 person Hangout chat session with HD video quality, a perk previously unavailable to standard subscribers. Furthermore, these new premium features introduce enhanced privacy controls that let admins restrict a Google+ post’s visibility, along with the option to hide employee profiles from external searches.
