Google Apps Officially Launched in Romania! Exclusive Photos Inside!

"Buna dimineata!" This is how Michael Champlin, Business Product Manager, started the Google Apps conference which took place yesterday in Bucharest. The Google suite of utilities equipped with Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk, iGoogle, Docs & Spreadsheets and many other tools is now available to Romanians and what's more important, straight into their native language. "It's a priority for us to bring our products in your language," the Google official explained. Now let me talk about yesterday's press conference held by Google. We all know it's pretty difficult to roll out your solutions on a new market especially when you're a famous company such as Google. And the super giant knows it. "People's expectations are rising," Michael Champlin admitted. But how can Google help the Romanian companies improve their offering and become more present in the online competition?

"Google Apps is actually about promoting your brand," Google's representative stated. And if you ever analyzed Apps' utilities, I'm sure you agree with it because Google's suite lets you personalize the technologies depending on your needs. For example, you can replace the Google or the Gmail logo appearing inside the products using simple functions. But the Mountain View company is not satisfied with the current configuration options offered to the users and some new settings might be rolled out in the future. "We can do more and maybe in the future [we'll see] something similar to iGoogle."

What is Michael Champlin talking about? Maybe gadget support for Gmail, maybe some themes to change the interface but nobody knows for sure. Somebody in the audience asked about a filtering option to allow the consumers organize the emails by their size. "You can do that," Michael quickly answered. And you may know it, you can easily look for the largest emails by using Google's search operators into Gmail's search box.

Getting back to the Romanian market, we all know that it's quite difficult to convince the new users that you can bring only good things to them. "The experience is getting very rich," Michael Champlin said. "Your users are your users, we're not trying to steal them," he continued. Beside its famous solutions, Google Apps comes with "very strong administration tools", which allow you to organize your account in no time.

Gmail and iGoogle seem to be the most useful technologies included in Google Apps, but Docs & Spreadsheets also has a lot of fans. While the Google Mail received numerous improvements in the last few days, "the start page is a great way to introduce your users to the web," Michael Champlin stated. Although I'm sure you know, Google's Personalize Homepage can be equipped with numerous utilities (a.k.a. gadgets) starting with Gmail tools and ending with weather information.

Now let me tell you some juicy details about the conference. While trying to demonstrate the Google Apps mobile abilities, Michael Champlin revealed that the Mountain View company gave him a Blackberry which is fully supported by the Google-powered technologies. How about a Gphone, Michael? Maybe soon, as these days' rumors sustain.

Remember that bluescreen which occurred during a Microsoft presentation? Although it was not such a serious matter, Google's representative was continuously bothered by a NOD32 antivirus error which asked for new username and password required for the updating process. "Incorrect username and password," the error informed. The funny thing is that this error appeared exactly when Michael Champlin was asked to provide details about a potential operating system from Google. Although he denied the rumors, he admitted that Google should develop an OS: "We should do something about this error, we should avoid bluescreens."

Please have a look at the following pictures to view some of the most important moments of yesterday's Google Apps conference.