While not exhaustive, here are a few settings from the "advanced tools" section in the Google Apps console, which are worthwhile to knowing. Details can be found in the online help.

Managing authentication: Ac tivation of SSO (Single Sign On) is the most significant setting here. SSO is a mechanism based on the SAML standard that makes it possible for a user to authenticate only once to access many applications in the IS. Chapter 8, Federated Identity and SSO will be entirely dedicated to this subject.

The administrator can also require a password with a minimal length and monitor the security level of passwords for each user.

It is also possible to activate OpenID, which will allow users to choose Google Apps as their authentication provider when accessing third-party applications that implement this standard.

Google Analytics enabling. Re call that Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates statistics about the visits of a website and thus provides a measure of its marketing efficiency.

The administration APIs. This section in the advanced settings provides links to three especially useful APIs:

We shall come back to these APIs in more detail in Chapter 9, Advanced Integration.