Google, sometimes you are water to a drowning man. With your fancy, model-breaking free services, your forever-beta attitude, your kicking font. So many services, so many configurations, so many thoughtful ways for a simple man like myself to divulge my personal information.

But this month, you have showered me with useful things. So man, in fact, that I have to shout it from the rooftops.

For Google Apps Users

I’ve been a raving lunatic for Google Apps since they launched. For those not familiar with the service, Google Apps allows you to take your domain name (like fifthandmain.com) and map all your familiar Google services to it. Use the nearly bulletproof Gmail service for your business’s email using your own domain, and have calendars, documents, internal websites, and more all hosted and shared across team members. There are three tiers of Google Apps: Education, Standard, and Premiere. At this time, only the premiere level of service has a fee associated with it — $50/user per year.
That’s all backstory nonsense, though. The big news is here.

Presentations get Collaboration

Google Docs
For some time now, when working on a document in Google Docs (the company’s Microsoft Office challenger) you’ve been able to collaborate with other users in real time; working on a spreadsheet, you’d be able to see the cells your collaborator is working on as they’re editing them — same in word processing documents. This month, you can now collaborate as you build presentation decks, too. From Google: “Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element — text box, shape, image, video, etc — he is editing.”
This is great news for those of us who collaborate with others while writing online. For those who don’t collaborate online, the message here: you should start. That is all.

Shared Folders in Google Docs

Google Docs
If you’ve used Google Docs for any length of time inside an organization, you’ve likely run into the number one frustration in keeping your work in order with others: you can’t share folders of documents.
It seems like a small thing. “Just share one document at a time, Pete,” you’re saying. Sure, punk, I’ll do that. Until I get a list of 30-40 documents for a project and have to organize sharing with 6 team members … one doc at a time. After … ahem … not very long, you start looking for alternatives.
Not anymore! Huzzah from the mountain high! Google has released Shared Folders for Google Docs. This means, share a folder with those same 6 team members and all the documents, spreadsheets and presentations you dump into it get shared as well. I kid you not: this is one of those little features that will change the way you look at Google Docs as a serious collaboration tool. If you aren’t spending much time in Docs now, you owe it to yourselves and your teams to try it out.

Google Groups goes Apps Premiere

Google Apps Premiere
This is a big one. Big like the first iced cake, or the first round tire. Google Apps finally gets Google Groups built in. If you haven’t experienced the Groups platform, head over to groups.google.com for a taste. Then remove the spam and the porn, and imagine a nice, clean discussion forum just for your company. Your branding, your conversations, your colorful vernacular. Adding a rich forum to your internal communication infrastructure can be a real boon to team collaboration and productivity. Microsoft has the same feature set built into their enterprise tool, Sharepoint, which is as fantastic as it is complex. That Google has reduced the barriers to entry to such pittance should go to underscore the game-changing-ness that this represents.
The only downside: it’s only for the big spenders in the Apps Premiere and Education floors. Those of us at the standard level — the freeloaders — don’t get the glitz of Groups. Not now, likely not ever.

Browser Size tool in Google Labs

Google Browser Size
Finally, a tool for all you people who are stuck on how big your web pages are in the browser. The kind folks in the Google usability group have analyzed a sample of the search hits they get and drilled down to the size of each user’s browser.
Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.
This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a “donate now” button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.
I tend to design for the larger browsers, if I can hit 90% (in the light blue area), I’m happy. Here’s a recent design in the tool:

It’s beautiful. Very quick, easy, and free visualization of design and efficacy on the web. Check it out!