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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.'"
Needing to be connected to the web sucks for those who travel.
Or am I the only one to have thought of that?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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?
I hate to give Microsoft props, but there are features that are critical to the office use of software. If Google doesn't provide those features, they will not be able to compete at all. Which means that the supposed "leverage" with Microsoft would be nothing more than hogwash.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Dont think of it as an instant messenger then. Think of it as a "textual telephone"* that goes over the Internet. I've seen a few businesses around here where IM has become as important as email and the telephone to keep in touch
*Yes, I know, GTalk does voice also
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I anticipate the Google apps are going to continue to improve. Since last night they have added fonts (was a very basic selection before), added the docs and spreadsheet into the domain settings so that things are easier to share within-company.
Also, after they bought Writely and the spreadsheet company they also baught a second spreadsheet company. Reviewing their product I noticed it had a much more complete set of Excel features. How hard would it be for them to tack an SQL service to this? My guess: Not too hard at all.
We use a Jabber-based system at my office. If you are not on it at all times, the boss gets pissy. It's the primary way we communicate in-office. We mostly use it to send links to folders on the file server, or to get quick responses to questions.
The people that really need to watch out are Lotus. I've been admining a Domino server for about 8 years now and let me tell you, it's the second biggest pain in the ass that I have to deal with. Google's solution would fully replace Lotus for all the things we use it for and actually do it better.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Agree, absolutely. Love the software, but like hell are we hosting key services elsewhere. With Google hosting the apps, if we lose Internet access, and we might as well close up and go home.
Personally, I'm amazed there isn't an appliance version of GMail available yet. Although I suppose they'd have to get it out of beta first...
True, but I wonder how long it will be before Google provides an appliance like their search one to provide this, while keeping everything inside the company firewall...
Random Musings
and you would overhear many MS employees' lunch meetings around here. As early as 3-4 years ago, there was a lot of buzz about starting projects like what Google's doing now. The "Live" initiative will supposedly eventually convince people to submit micro-payments to use Office products. ($0.25 per Word doc creation, $0.50 per printing, etc.) The MS people who were talking about this acted like it was the best thing since sliced bread and that it will cure cancer. It'll probably be deployed around 2015.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
When you configure Google Apps, you can pick and choose what you want your employees to be able to do. So if you feel gchat or the custom webpages are a waste of time, you're free to disable them.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
Companies can customize the Gmail accounts to reflect their workers and firms (worker@firm.com).
Many of your other stated concerns are somewhat generic to any change in mail services - I encountered several of them by moving our employees to an in-house mail server from a myriad of outside services. IMHO:
1. Always a problem with changes in service. Users have to decide what's important in their mail, and you get to figure out how to keep it for them, either via migration or having them download a copy locally & make backups of that.
2. That's a question for Google, that I bet they'd answer if you asked them. However, if you get your emails via POP3 & leave a copy on the server, you're covered locally even if Google goes belly-up.
3. Common problem. Users basically have to get with the changes - although, if you're already managing your email addys, there's no reason you can't arrange for Google to "step in" on your domain & then no one has to change.
4. Without internet, there is no email anyway, unless you have only intranet communications. See which one your company would rather do without (I can always use the intercom in-house).
5. Another Google question. I assume that you would have the option to not have your mail screened.
6. Any large number of emails would be a pain to set up manually. However, my mail server allows the importation of a text file to create accounts - I'd be very surprised if there was no such facility available through Google, if you were going to pay them for a large number of accounts.
7. That does suck. Perhaps a relay machine could work as an intermediary?
8. Public folders as a share, that would be a good question. If it's just a matter of a shared account, though, then...share the password. ;-)
OTOH, for small businesses that want to keep costs down, this will be useful. One will not need as powerful computers, one will not need in house servers, or rented off site servers, and one will not need to generate a backup plan. I recall at one point when I was backing up a couple servers, the annual cost in tapes and time was a more than the $600 google fee.
Of course, questions remain. For instance who owns the data? Can it be saved to a MS or ODT format? And, of course, when the FBI, or even the local competitor, sends a subpoena will all data ever stored be immediately released.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
gMail is pop. As slick as the interface is, I really like working with IMAP or even Exchange servers. It is nice for all of my devices to be in sync. I hate checking email on my phone, then getting back to gMail and everything I did is (to some extent) lost.
If gMail implements IMAP, *THEN* they will have a much more competitive offereing, at least on the email side of things.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Face it, compared to IMAP, all webmail sucks, even Gmail. So far, there is no IMAP access to Gmail. My university considered moving mail to Gmail, but lack of IMAP access is a deal killer.
Welcome back to 1975, where mainframes and 'pay as you go' computing ruled the day.
The Personal Computer, if google/microsoft have their way, will cease to exist. Welcome back the dumb terminal.
Let google/microsoft store all your data, for a low monthly fee.
Use all your favorite applications, for a low monthly fee.
It's the old micropayment bullshit, disguised as a new 'pay as you go' initiative. Same shit, different smell.
1975 called, it wants its 'micropayment' system back.
There's the cost of downtime. I work for a rather small company, and we've estimated the cost of peak-hour downtime at around $1000 / hour, simply from a wage perspective, not including lost productivity. That number would be even higher. Because of this, we have a rather distributed server architecture (IE split up functionally), with all servers being clusters. The business is only an 8-8 one, not 24/7, but it's been over two years since we've had ANY downtime. We've had six occasions where the internet was down for over two hours during that timeframe, during which time our provider said "tough". Granted, we could invest in a more expensive connection, multi-homing, or other technologies, but that's still no guarantee. It definitely isn't worth the cost. For us, internet currently has no crucial role besides outbound E-mail, the interruptions were hardly noticeable.
There's also the performance consideration. Right now, we get away with around 6mbps of throughput. Our average office document size is 245k. I don't see how we could be able to maintain decent performance without at least doubling our bandwidth. Still wouldn't compete with our fibre channel arrays and GbE for the boss's huge PPT presentation, or a 200-page report with graphics.
I face all same security issues above, but in addition to that, loss of key files is simply not tolerable. I'd guestimate the intellectual property value our data is 8-9 figures, and it's simply not worth trusting google. We use Volume Shadow Copy, Hard drive to Hard drive online backup, a nightly tape incremental (Taken offsite) and a weekly full tape (taken to a different offsite location). Google's systems may or may not be better and I doubt they're worse, but they're not accountable to me, and I have no control or auditing of their procedures.
If you're a small upstart company looking at building an IT infrastructure from the ground up, or your downtime costs aren't so great, it may not be such a bad idea. However, not only are the above issues, but the learning curve, and associated productivity loss. Sure, it may be cheaper to license, but at $50 vs $225, even if I save $3-5k per year, it only takes a few hours of downtime or any other issue to totally destroy that. Just not worth it right now.