Power Panel Makes Google Apps More Complete

Google Apps is great. Well, it’s great as long as your needs are very simple. Once you start digging into more sophisticated features such as performing bulk administrative tasks you start to see the limitations. Google Apps even lacks a usable shared address book at this point. For a company, this is a major reason to stick to their existing Exchange architecture.

Luckily there are 3rd party add-ons that address some of these shortcoming. Power Panel from LTech is one add-on that makes Google Apps a whole lot more useful. I’ve reached out to Ed Laczynski, founder and CTO of LTech to let him explain what Power Panel is and how it can increase the value of Google Apps.

Unfortunately Power Panel is not available for Google Apps Standard, as it does not support API access or the Google App Engine.

What is Power Panel?
Power Panel is a Google Apps add-on product that provides IT and end-users with features that extend the power of the Google Apps platform. The product is deployed on the Google Apps Engine, and secured within a customers’ Google Apps domain.

Power Panel features include:

• Role Based Security – Allows help desk and IT support personnel to manage users, passwords, and profiles using a delegated security model.
• User Gadget – End-users can access the features of Power Panel directly from a Google Gadget within GMail.
• Contact Journal – Provides users with a 360-degree view of their contacts and relationships inside and outside of the organization.
• QuickLinks for Information Workers – Power Panel allows executives, managers and IT to distribute links to commonly used workflow applications, forms and documents directly to end-users within the GMail browser canvas via a centrally controlled gadget.
• Shared Contact Search – Provides end-users direct access to add, edit and search organization-wide contacts.
• User Templates and Macros for IT – Includes user lifecycle management tools, including onboarding and offboarding templates, and macros.
• Integration Framework – Using Power Panel as an integration point, customers can tie data from CRM and help desk systems to extend the reach and interoperability of the Google Apps platform.

When was Power Panel first released?
Power Panel was first released in September 2009. We continue to develop new features and have provided subsequent product releases to current customers at no cost. The platform is constantly being built out as our Google Apps professional services team works through use cases with customers.

Can you comment on how what the installed base of Power Panel is?
Power Panel has 30,000+ Google Apps Premier users and 400,000+ users on Google Apps Partner Edition. We are forecasting increased growth with the latest release of Power Panel which provides end-user focused features and integration of CRM and back-office applications directly into the GMail canvas.

Does Power Panel work with all versions of Google Apps?
Power Panel works with Google Apps Premier and Education Editions and we have a version specific for ISPs that works with Google Apps Partner Edition.

Tell us a bit more about the shared contacts feature. How does it work and how does it integrate with the applications for the end-user?
Power Panel provides the ability to bulk upload shared contacts as well as extended fields for these contacts. End-users have the ability to search shared contacts through the Power Panel gadget.

Power Panel adds “Macros” to Google Apps. What can you do with these Macros?
Macros allow for global changes across all users or specific groups of users. Current functions included deletion of all shared contacts, requiring password change upon next login and enabling or disabling IMAP or POP3.

So Power Panel provides the “users with a 360-degree view of their contacts and relationships inside and outside of the organization.” What does this mean and how does it work?
The Contact Journal provides end-users information on upcoming appointments, shared documents, group memberships, common contacts and social network profiles are available directly within the GMail web client. Contact Journal also serves as an integration point for CRM data from vendors like SalesForce™.

Another feature mentioned is “advanced group management.” How does this work and what can it be used for?
The advanced group management functionality available through Power Panel is designed to allow IT personnel to make changes more efficiently. Features include adding users to multiple groups at once, removing a user from all groups, adding multiple users to a group and the ability to distinguish between group owners and group members.

How much do you charge for Power Panel?
Licensing for Power Panel is $3 per user per year for Google Apps Premier and we provide special pricing for education and non-profit organizations.

The verdict
Power Panel definitely makes Google Apps more useful. Both the administrative side and the user-side gets the work done. It is worth noting though that Power Panel could need some visual polishing (not all pages looks like the screenshot above). On the user-side, the Power Panel integrates in the form of a ‘gadget.’ It then shows up as an iframe within Google Apps Mail, which make it feel less integrated. That said, it gets the job done, and it was just recently released. Hopefully LTech will polish on the design in upcoming releases.