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Google Apps Premier Edition Launches
prostoalex writes "Google Apps is adding a premium offering: a custom 10-GB Gmail box, Google Calendar, GTalk instant messenger, Writely, Google Pages, Google Custom home page iGoogle and Google SpreadSheets for $50 a year per employee. The NYTimes provides some details on competitive pricing: 'By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange,... in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.' Boston.com quotes an analyst for Nucleus Research on Google's ease-of-use: '"What we see in the Google Apps is a real focus on making them easy to use and intuitive," she said. "And that's something that Microsoft has been unable to do in all of its years with Office."' But the same analyst is bearish on Google Apps' shortcomings relative to the mature Microsoft desktop products: 'Right now Google's going to give companies a better ability to negotiate with Microsoft.'"
I use the google apps at home, even though I have a licensed copy of office, cause I like to access it easily from work and home.. However, the one very limiting factor is the spreadsheets won't connect to databases. Lots of businesses have excel doing simple DB reporting, and this just won't work with the spreadsheet app. (yet??)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
> Is that really a fair comparison, though? Google's email is great, but their Spreadsheet and Word Processor solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as MS Office. And in an office environment, many of those differences do matter.
For simple documents and spreadsheets, Google's office apps are sufficient. And I would say at least 75% of documents are simple enough to fall into this category. I certainly wouldn't call it a replacement though, but rather it works well besides MS Office especially with the live updates allowing multiple people to edit a document simultaneously.
> I haven't played with Google Calendar enough, but would it be a workable replacement for the Outlook calendar? i.e. Can you schedule meetings with a simple invite rather than telling everyone to put it on their calendar? Can other users see your unavailable periods when scheduling? Yes, it can do all that. IMHO it is better that the calendar in Outlook.
Yea you can send invites in google calendar, but the "availability" features aren't there yet. BUT in their "compare editions" page http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editio ns.html
it states that "Shared Calendar Resources" are available in the purchased edition. I havn't tried it so I can't really comment.
As of right now (at least with the free version) the integration of calendar and mail is lightweight. You can send invitations from your calendar, but if you receive ical (*.ics) attachments from others, they just appear as attachments and don't have any quick way of getting the info into your calendar. You have to save the attachment, then go into calendar and do an import, but I haven't had that always work - especially with something like a cancellation.
Back when we where considering going from Exchange 5.5 to 2003 ( a huge pain in the butt ) I considered moving us to an online alternative. intranets.com now WebOffice ( webex umbrella ) provided somewhat of an alternative at that point. Now they are even better that they offer email hosting, with your domain not "gmail.com".
Several factors stopped me from being able to make that jump.
1) Legacy...everyone was using Exchange and we had tons of email in it that would be a pain to copy into folders.
2) Regulation. How does google keep all company emails in one place that can be archived and backed up. I'm sure Google won't loose someone's email anytime soon ( less likely then us ), but how do you document their backup procedures.
3) Current email addresses. No one wanted to give them up.
4) Internet bandwidth and reliance. People tend to think of the internet like electricity, but we are not there yet. It is funny that I get a faster connection at my house with a cable modem then our dual t1s provide...and a lot cheaper. This is another post, but unless you are in a big data center getting a decent sized pipe at a reasonable price is still overpriced.
5) Gateway level controls. We wanted to see every email that came in. We run a spam firewall, but if it blocks errantly we have a log. If Google blocks and email?
6) Customer support emails. We have tons of email addresses for our clients/etc that would probably be a pain to setup.
7) Fax support. We have to integrate with a fax server...yep it sucks.
8) Public folders ( ie email boxes accessible by more then one person )...ties in with 6.
To name a few.
If I was starting up a small software company I'd be all over this. As far as for enterprise uses...I think Google has a long road ahead of them...but they are speeding car.
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
Google Documents is still very much in it's infancy as well, and not at all ready for wide-spread business use. I was stunned when i tried it out last week that there are a ton of warnings when trying to do something as simple as Find and Replace.
Among other things, that very basic and relied-upon feature is listed as "Experimental," it doesn't offer a "Replace" option, but only a "Replace All" and it is not able to be Un-Done.
That told me volumes about just how far this application has to go.
Just because it's by far the best web-based document editor in existence doesn't mean it's ready to compete head to head with Word.
I think it's great for personal use, especially for people like me who use GMail, but it's just not something I'd be ready to run a business on.
You can sync GCal with Outlook/Blackberry/whatever with this -> http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlin kforgoogle.html
You can also enable POP3 with Gmail.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
If you're looking for the state of the art today, take a look at the SubEthaEdit text editor for OS X. Basically, it is a text editor that can post a document on a LAN (autodiscovery via zeroconf) or on the internet if you know the hostname or IP and allow for collaborative editing. What is really nice is it has multiple, real time cursors so everyone can be typing at once with their own insertion point. It makes pair programming so much easier than hacked together solutions where giant chunks of text are suddenly appearing or where you have to trade control of the cursor off. The zeroconf discovery is really the icing on the cake. Go to the coffee shop, open the program, and select the file with no messing around with setting things up or connecting to one another somehow. I've seen it used for collaborative fiction as well.
Converting an entire business with a lot of travelling employees to Google Apps instead of traditional apps that will work on a non-networked PC is probably still premature,
Yes, as as user of google apps, I can say its not ready yet...
For example, maintaining email lists for mail outs isn't really working yet. Even though you can redirect your gmail to another address, if you try and put that address into the email list for a group mail out it can fail. Specifically, if the address uses characters that aren't legal for a gmail address (such as an underscore), it can't be directly used as an address for a mailing list. You can create a "fake" gmail account which exists for the sole purpose of redirection, but this is hardly going to impress a business...
Combine this with the problem of actually providing feedback to google - if there is support I haven't found it in the product yet - and I'd be saying it isn't ready yet.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.