In case you missed it, the Google Apps Marketplace launched 4 weeks ago and created a wave of buzz. Much to our surprise it has generated quite a few inquiries for moving to Google Apps. While it’s still early we’re really excited about the direction that the marketplace is headed. Here are a few tips you can use to discover more of what’s inside…
When you navigate to http://google.com/enterprise/marketplace at the top of the page, you’ll notice the search box indicates your search will be conducted across the entire site. Alternatively, if you choose a sub-category from the left navigation bar the same search box gives you the ability to search within the sub-category or the entire site.
If you’re not already familiar with the Google product offering for businesses this might cause you to wonder a bit. So for clarification…
Due to the way in which Google Apps Marketplace functions for vendors the difference between products and services, can be somewhat misleading. Vendors get the option to define their offering as a service or product. Unfortunately, this is a bit of an industry wrinkle that unfortunately isn’t easily solved. For instance, “product” vendors sell typically sell their software as a service (SaaS) and many service companies sell their “service” as a product. In a perfect world we would all agree on a naming convention and stop confusing you all but for now please bare with us.
We’re really looking forward to increased search capability in the marketplace. As good as Google is at search, they seem to have held off on making search “Googley”. Our guess is the omission was deliberate and things will be enhanced in future releases. In the meantime, you can get a fairly good results if you use descriptors in the search field, for instance, “topic location”. Keep in mind the search term is being used against the entire listing, so it may not be readily apparent why a particular result was returned until you view the listing details.
We saved the best for last! Go to the marketplace, click on a Google Apps sub-category (example: Small Business Implementation), scroll to the bottom of the page. Notice the 1 Next links. If you select, Next you’ll get more pages which seems fairly obvious but it took us a bit to find our own listing, so we’re guessing that others may have missed it too.
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