Google Apps becomes a commercial product

Some five months after launching Google Apps for Your Domain, Google is out with a commercial version called Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Apps Premier is a beefed up version of Google Apps for Your Domain (Gafyd), itself a repackaging of some well known Google products. With Premier, you get email, shared calendar, instant messaging, internet voice calls, web page publishing and real-time collaborative documents and spreadsheets. Mailbox limit has been raised to 10 Gb, email is covered by a service level guarantee and there is support for users and the administrator. Annual subscription is $50 per user. The existing Gafyd product remains available for free.

The service is not a fully fledged office suite. There is no application to churn out presentations; this could be a deal breaker for many organisations where Microsoft PowerPoint has taken over from Microsoft Word as the environment of choice for writing documents. The spreadsheet is not as advanced as Microsoft Excel, it lacks pivot tables for example. The power of Google Docs and Spreadsheets is in the real-time sharing capabilities.

I have helped set up the Google Apps for Your Domain service for three startup companies and Gafyd remains a good, free option for small firms and organisations. In fact, the free version of the service is more attractive now that Premier offers a way to grow (extra mailbox limits, meeting room schedules, support and SLAs). There is little reason for startup firms to opt for the Premier Edition right away, but Premier could be attractive to organisations that want to simplify their IT or save costs - and need migration of users, email, data or integration with an existing infrastructure.

All the concerns raised about SaaS in general are applicable to Google Apps Premier Edition. Don't use if you are concerned with what jurisdiction your data resides in. Don't use if you are based in a country that is likely to block access to the service. Think twice about it if your teams are offline for long periods of time or served by low bandwidth (see Zero bandwidth scenarios, March 2006).

Most of my previous predictions about Google Apps have been proved right with the launch of Premier. I suspect future versions will address behind-the-firewall access and include more applications. Behind the firewall access will be provided by rolling out Google Apps to the users of Google appliances. Behind-the-firewall access is likely to be addressed before offline access. A wiki is a likely application to be added to the mix, perhaps a one with presentation features to address the lack of a slide composer. Google has more applications that would be useful in an enterprise setting and some of them, such as Analytics, Blogger, Translation, may find their way into the Apps bundle.

Some organisations that start using Google Apps might find it difficult to adjust to "2.0" thinking, particularly if they have been used to traditional office suites. Throughout, these tools rely on tags and search rather than folders, inviting participants instead of emailing copies and a timeline of changes instead of formal version control. All very wiki, bringing with it a change to a more agile relationship between information, people and the organisation.

Tags: Google Google Apps Premier Edition Google Apps Gafyd SaaS office suite Google Enterprise Gmail collaboration tagging

Comments

[scott]

As Google own JotSpot, I think the addition of a wiki to the Gafyd package is certainly likely in the next 12 months.