Developers go big for business at Google I/O 2010

There was a big focus on developing software for businesses at Google I/O this year, centered around three themes: build and sell apps in the Marketplace, customize and extend Google's apps, and build your own apps for internal use. The news kicked off the day before Google I/O with the announcement of Gmail contextual gadgets and many enhancements for Google Apps Script, including JDBC support. Then during the keynote, we launched Google App Engine for Business and announced our collaboration with VMware, and continued with the announcement of Google Wave (Labs) availability in Google Apps and Exchange support in Android 2.2 (aka Froyo).


Altogether there were more than a dozen technical sessions focused on the enterprise and more than 20 Google Apps Marketplace vendors demoing in the Enterprise Developer Sandbox.

Here’s a recap of a few of the sessions below. You can find the videos and slides for these sessions on the linked session title:

• Scripting Google Apps for business process automation - Google’s Evin Levey showed off the latest developments from Google Apps Script, and explained how developers can use the tool to automate business processes.
  
  
• Reach new customers fast: Learn how to sell your cloud app on the Google Apps Marketplace - Google’s Scott McMullan was joined by Jay Simmons (Atlassian), Chuck Dietrich (SlideRocket) and Amit Kulkarni (Manymoon) to discuss best practices for launching an app in the Google Apps Marketplace. This session was followed by a technical overview of how developers integrate apps with the Marketplace.
  
  
• Building context-aware extensions for Gmail - Deep dive on Gmail contextual gadgets - Google recently launched Gmail contextual gadgets, allowing developers to intelligently surface their apps directly in the Gmail message UI based on the content of the message. In this session, Dan Holevoet of Google explained how to create and distribute these gadgets.
  
  
• Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we do. Google CIO Ben Fried and his team discussed how Google runs real-world business applications on App Engine, and gave practical advice on how enterprise IT developers can make App Engine work with firewalls, legacy systems and proprietary systems. We unveiled this video yesterday along with the rest of the App Engine videos, but are reiterating it here as this session is quite relevant to the enterprise.
  
  
• Making Freemium work - converting free users to paying customers - In this panel moderated by Google’s Don Dodge, venture capitalists Brad Feld, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran and Joe Kraus discussed strategies for building free products that can be upgraded to paid versions.
  

You can also find all videos for Enterprise I/O 2010 sessions in this YouTube playlist.

We’re excited to see the great strides our enterprise developer community has made, and we're looking forward to seeing even more innovation and progress at next year’s I/O. We hope to see you then!

Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Apps team