Google launches analytics tool for Google Apps

Google wants to help businesses monitor how staff respond to corporate decisions

Google is giving IT administrators a wider range of tools to monitor employee use of the internet.

Google Analytics for Google Apps will provide administrators with data and graphs on how frequently staff log in to Google Docs and Google Sites, and the duration of their visit.

The search giant suggested that organisations could determine whether employees have read the latest company policy, for example, or how adept they are at finding a particular web site.

"You can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more," said Google Apps engineer Nick Cooper in a blog posting.

The Google Analytics tool was first launched to give businesses more insight into the type of external web site traffic they receive in order to strengthen marketing initiatives. But Google now intends businesses to deploy the tool to monitor how staff respond to business decisions.

Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to link Google Analytics accounts to Google Apps through the Google Apps administrative control panel.

In a separate blog posting, Google also announced that it is expanding the capabilities of the Google Visualization API by enabling developers to display data from any source connected to the web.

The Visualization API was originally designed to allow developers to build applications on top of Google spreadsheets, but the applications can now be built on top of any database or spreadsheet.