A powerful user search and self-service tool for Google Apps has been launched to help users find and keep information up to date. The new tool CloudPages, has been developed by Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) and is designed to reduce the time spent on the laborious task of information retrieval.

James Doggart, MD of CTS explained. “Searching an internal directory for information is usually one of the most used applications within a company. CloudPages greatly improves this - saving time and money. As well as providing standard search for names and e-mail addresses it also offers an intuitive search using keywords such as job titles, skills and local resources. For example, it can quickly find a Polish speaker who works in the London office of an organisation, even if the person is searching in say, New York.”

Google Apps is one of the fastest growing productivity tools for businesses of all size and type. Like any well-used application, finding information as well as keeping that information up-to-date, can be a time-consuming task without the right tools to help. This is particularly the case for large organisations with many users geographically dispersed.

CloudPages also enables a simple and fast self-service capability that allows all users to keep their own information up-to-date. The new tool also helps reduce the problems caused by forgotten passwords – a bane of all computer users' lives.

“This means that the company does not have to dedicate someone to carrying out this important task,” explained James. “Normally, when someone forgets their password they have to ring a help desk and wait while it is reset. This makes them unproductive while this is happening, as well as costing the company money by having expensive support staff dealing with a low-level issue. CloudPages solves this problem by allowing the user to reset their own password based on a challenge-response system. It also enables stronger password security to be enforced.”

CloudPages has been rigorously tried and tested in the field and has since been developed to ensure it can work for any organisation using Google Apps.