When it comes to supplying software solutions to the U.S. governmental agencies they all have to be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Most of us wouldn’t have any interest in this but this certification was the center point last year when Google launched a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior after it awarded a large contract to Microsoft.

In the lawsuit Google claimed that it had been unfairly excluded from the bidding process even though its Google Apps for Government had the necessary FISMA certification.

Except as it turns out it didn’t.

At least that is what was revealed recently as some of the court papers from the lawsuit were made public. In fact is that the Department of Justice rejected Google’s claim that their Google Apps for Government had any sort of FISMA certification.

In fact Google made this claim not once but three times in its motion for a preliminary injunction bu in light of the disclosure by the DoJ one has to wonder if Google knowingly mislead the court or outright lied.

On top of this Google continues to state this FISMA certification

Google has repeated this statement in many other places as well. Indeed, for several months and as recently as this morning, Google’s website states, “Google Apps for Government – now with FISMA certification.” And as if that’s not sufficient, Google goes farther on another webpage and states “Google Apps for Government is certified and accredited under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).”

via Microsoft on the Issues

Of course Google apologists will call into question the fact that it is Microsoft bringing this story to the forefront but the simple fact is that Google is at the very least misrepresenting the facts here regarding their FISMA certification.

Google has yet to respond to this revelation.

UPDATE: My good friend Frederic Lardinios at NewsGrange got a response from Google on the story:

Here is a statement from Google’s David Mihalchik (Strategy and Business Development Lead Google Federal) regarding this issue:

“This case is about the Department of Interior limiting its proposal to one product that isn’t even FISMA certified, so this question is unrelated to our request that DOI allow for a true competition when selecting its technology providers.

Even so, we did not mislead the court or our customers.  Google Apps received a FISMA security authorization from the General Services Administration in July 2010.   Google Apps for Government is the same system with enhanced security controls that go beyond FISMA requirements.  As planned we’re working with GSA to continuously update our documentation with these and other additional enhancements.”

Nice little bit of misdirection if you ask me.

[UPDATED] Is Google lying or misleading over FISMA certification of Google Apps for Government? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google today announced a new feature which allows developers to defer new feature releases through their Google Apps program. Under the new plan developers can choose the “Rapid Release” option which pushes out new features automatically or a “Scheduled Release” feature which provides more control over when new features are made available.

The announcement comes at a time when Google has begun to further expand their Apps offering into enterprise solutions.

Google Communications Manager Jessica Kositz told ReadWriteWeb:

“We expect many SMBs to choose rapid release, and scheduled release to appeal to our larger customers with more complex IT environments.”

The move means developers can choose if employees or customers receive new features automatically, which in many cases may cause security and other vulnerabilities to occur.

Along with the ability to stop scheduled releases, Google has also launched their What’s New website which notifies Apps customers about upcoming features so developers can determine ahead of time if they want to deploy the feature immediately or wait until further testing has been completed on their backend.

Here’s a look at the What’s New website:

As you’ll notice the site creates a calendar of scheduled events so developers can quickly browse upcoming releases, while release notes are also included to provide more information about each new feature.

Google Apps Now Allows Developers To Defer Scheduled Releases is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google has always offered excellent text-to-text translation services, now the company is apparently working on Smartphone software that would allow users to talk in their own language, while having their speech immediately translated into the language of whomever their speaking to.

The software would greatly benefit overseas travelers and business executives who often must rely on a translator or speaking in broken language.

According to GizmoWatch:

“Speech-to-speech translation is possible with ‘high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition’ only. The idea is that the users phone would adapt to the user by learning their style of talking and make it easier to translate in real time.

No word yet as to when mobile users can expect to see the new technology, or if it will be available on phones other than Google created offerings. In any case, the ability to speak freely to anyone in any language would be worth the download.

Google Working On Smartphones With Voice-To-Voice Translation Services Built-In is a post from: The Inquisitr

I ran across this little tidbit of news over the Christmas holidays and it amazes me that more people aren’t asking if what is being reported is something we really want to see happening.

You see Google has been running a bit of an advertising campaign built around the fact that over 60% of the United States state governments are using part or all of Google’s Apps. I realized that the open source and freetard brigade will argue that this is a great thing given that it boost the whole idea of free and open source software in the public eye but stop and think for a minute.

60% plus. That’s 60% or better of states who are storing supposedly private and extremely personal data of ours on a third party server of a company thats sole purpose is to index all the information in the world.

Uhm .. did you give your state government permission to to this?

Are you really comfortable with the fact that Google is now storing data that it has no business being near?

As pointed out by Sherri over at philosecurity

In other words, according to Google, United States state governments have literally handed over our public data to be held and managed by a private company which has well-publicized partnerships with other governments such as China. The data is physically stored in Google’s buildings, on Google’s servers, managed by Google’s employees. This means Google now controls our government’s access to it’s own data.

I’m all for open source and free crap but when it comes to our data being held by any government it has no business being stored on a corporate server – especially a company with partnerships that include places like China.

Sorry this is a bad idea and one that should be stopped. It will only end badly.

Government data, our data, now held by Google is a post from: The Inquisitr

There is no denying the fact that Google is a big believer in cloud computing and web based software. In fact much of their future growth is built on the principal of getting as many people as possible using their software whether it be Google search, Gmail or their Google Docs suite of office type programs. This of course is putting them in direct competition with Microsoft which means it has had to find different ways to get their software in the hands of consumers.

One of the principal ways that they have done this is to use the same tactic that Apple and Microsoft have been using for years – hit the colleges and universities. The first prong of their attach started over two years ago with them making the education providers an offer they couldn’t really refuse in a climate of growing IT costs. Google would provide them unlimited hosted email and other applications all of which would be branded by the institution for the price of – free.

With things like their browser, a possible operating system, and the in development Google Wave being added to this package Google has a chance to become an ingrained part of the student’s lives as they move from school to the business world. Right now Google is already providing services to some 4 million students and is providing serious competition to Microsoft for access to 17 million students on the more than 4,000 campuses in the US.

The campus push is part of Google’s broader bid to breed a generation of workers comfortable with the concept of "cloud" computing, and particularly Google’s version of it, where Google provides free web-based services in exchange for advertising dollars. "We want to build relationships with these users for life," said Jeff Keltner, Google’s business development manager for the program.

Source: Business Insider – Google’s 17 Million Built-in Chrome OS Users (GOOG)

The ability to offer colleges and universities a way to save millions of dollars a year in IT costs is making Google an almost irresistible force for these institutions while at the same time creating a constantly refreshing generation of Google users.

Google’s secret to taking over the world is a post from: The Inquisitr

While the rest of the real world is sucking back all the Michael Jackson Memorial news it can those of us in the tech world are falling to our knees to report on how Google has removed the Beta tag from Google Apps and Gmail. When I fired up FeedDemon this morning to get started on my day I was inundated with what seemed like a flood of news from all the major tech blogs about this blogosphere shaking news.

Just to give you an idea of the coverage here’s a list of blogs that I follow who wrote about this monumental event

After five years, Gmail is ‘beta’ no more! – The Raw Feed
Wait. “Gmail Beta” Isn’t a Registered Trademark? – Digital Daily
Gmail and other Google Apps ‘Out of Beta’ – TheNextWeb.com
Google finally rips the beta label off Gmail and other Google Apps – VentureBeat
Google Apps Leaves the Beta Label Behind – GigaOM
Google Finally Peels The Beta Label Off Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and GTalk – TechCrunch

That it took a company like Google the better part of five years for Gmail and two years or so for Google Apps to figure out that corporate IT had a problem using applications marked beta across their networks is a tad on the ridiculous side. This was nothing more than a marketing and PR move as nothing has changed with any of these beta stripped applications that makes them anymore of a finished product than they were before.

While the beta labeling of their software may have provided them with some legal protection they are now acknowledging that these are indeed finished and complete software applications. So it will be interesting to see what happens the next time Google Apps or GMail suffers a massive outage or data loss.

I will admit though as pointless as this type of news is it is fun to watch how everyone literally falls over themselves to get those posts out there whenever Google does anything.

image courtesy of WorldGaming

Let’s all get a woodie over removing a beta label is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well this should just get the Google fans all a ga-ga. This morning the web search giant and wannabe threat to Microsoft’s enterprise desktop dominance announced that it was releasing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (and they make fun of Microsoft naming of applications). This plug-in will let you use Microsoft Outlook with the Premier and Education editions of Google Apps.

Some of the key features are

• Email, calendar, and contacts synchronization. For email, the plug-in uses the offline Gmail protocol, which is much faster than IMAP or other methods.

• Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.

• A simple, two-click data migration tool which allows employees to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.

Here’s a 3 minute video to give you an idea of how it works

And of course the typical gushing glowing third party glowing report of how much they like this new offering from Google. In this cae it a couple of IT execs from Genentech and Avago (prepare spin shields)

Google gives Microsoft another jab and release Google Apps plug-in for Outlook is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google Apps Status Dashboard

The new Google Apps Status Dashboard, announced in a blog posting late Wednesday afternoon, is touted as being a step toward greater transparency within Google’s services. Representatives directly tied its release to Tuesday’s Gmail outage, citing the need for better communication.

“The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products,” writes Tessa Prescott, a member of the Google Apps sales team.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard also provides additional tools for paying Google Apps customers to monitor their services’ functionalities.

Google has yet to release any type of explanation for Tuesday’s Gmail outage, though representatives did issue an apology for the inconvenience. The outage was Gmail’s sixth period of extended downtime in the past eight months.

Google Introduces App Status Dashboard to Deal with Downtime is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new Customer Network will link the platform to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and Flickr. Users will be able to search and share within any of those services and will also be able to access new discussion threads and user forums from the program.

Central Desktop, a competitor with such tools as Google Apps and Microsoft Sharepoint, is geared toward small- and mid-sized businesses. It allows employees to interact and share data from multiple locations.

The company has been around since 2005. It is based in Los Angeles.

Central Desktop Gets Social Integration is a post from: The Inquisitr

Many users were locked out of their accounts for almost 15 full hours Wednesday night into early Thursday morning. InfoWorld first picked up on the story, finding the discussion forums full of frustrated users — many of them, evidently, paying Google Apps subscribers who rely on Gmail for their corporate or educational mail access.

“For a company with your reputation, I’m absolutely shocked at the apparent absence of customer service,” one user wrote.

To Google’s credit, an advisor did post regular updates to that forum. The company also set up a second, read-only announcement board with occasional updates. The first posting came at 1:06 p.m. Wednesday:

“The Gmail Team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are actively investigating the issue, and we will provide updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

After two more postings indicating progress, the final message came at 3:43 a.m. Thursday:

“Users who were temporarily affected by this problem should now be able to access their account. Thanks for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue.”

Comments in the forums indicate a similar issue arose a couple of weeks ago, in mid-July.

It’s not clear how many users were affected in either instance.

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

The utility — a clear competitor to offerings such as Microsoft SharePoint and Google Apps — adds a database API, time tracking options, and an integrated help desk feature into its summer release. Existing features such as e-mail, instant messaging, and interactive calendar functions remain constant from previous versions.

“We do feel that a lot of customers really want a lot more functionality within a single app,” CEO Isaac Garcia told The Inquisitr.

Central Desktop is trying to carve its niche by focusing on the small- to mid-sized business markets — the area Garcia believes SharePoint is leaving behind as it targets larger enterprises.

“I don’t think we’ll move nearly as high enterprise as they are. We see lots of opportunity in that mid-market area,” he explained.

Central Desktop first launched in 2005 and is headquartered just outside of Los Angeles.

Central Desktop Ups the Ante on Web Collaboration is a post from: The Inquisitr

The search engine has signed an agreement with Netregistry and Devnet to bring a specially tailored version of Google Apps to the country. The customized suite will be marketed as a complete communication solution for businesses, boasting features such as local domain integration, email, calendar functions, and corporate instant messaging.

“The agreement … allows businesses without an existing internet domain to acquire an Australian domain (.com.au) when they sign up to Google Apps,” explains Google Director of Sales for Asia Pacific and Latin America Paul Slakey. “We’ve been thrilled with local businesses’ response.”

“Businesses all over Australia will have access to a range of applications that are powerful, simple to use, and deliver real productivity gains,” added Devnet CEO Craig Deveson. “Google has delivered a clearly differentiated product and we are confident business will get on board.”

The companies says their agreement marks the first time the Google Apps suite has been used in such a way in Australia.

Google Grabs New Australian Agreement is a post from: The Inquisitr