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Google Apps Premier Edition Launches, Widely Used
Tookis writes "Google's online productivity suite (Google Apps) has already replaced Microsoft products at more than 100,000 small to medium enterprises. Additionally, it's been deployed for serious work-related projects at two of the largest companies in the world. Product manager for Google Enterprise Kevin Gough was quick to point out that although the premier edition of Google Apps only just launched, it's already been adopted by companies like GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. He goes on to describe the role of Apps: to augment, not necessarily replace existing IT solutions. Just the same, he says, the role of Apps can be powerful where traditional services may be too expensive. Says Gough, 'There's a large segment that's under-served by today's productivity tools. Production workers and retail employees for instance. 48% of all employees actually don't even have an email address. That's because the cost of hardware, software and maintenance has made it prohibitively expensive to provide email to employees.'"
Not all retail workers are short time employees. At my local Publix I see the some of the same people year after year. Then again they offer benefits and tend to treat the employees pretty well from what I hear.
Email is useful even for a casher. They check it from home and get their schedule, information on company events, and so on.
They my not use it at the store but they may still use it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I have a few contacts at P&G having worked there before, and a quick survey of them shows noone has even heard of P&G testing this. Companies like P&G and GE have their software go through fairly extensive testing before releasing it in the company. The amount of spreadsheets that would have to be converted would be impossible to fix and it would place the documents out of P&G hands, something they would never allow to happen.
I used to be very excited about this idea. I only have windows boxes around for when I need to run office, usually for excel. OpenOffice does a damn good job nowadays, but there are still some things that have issues.
I was using the google aps for a while and was very happy about the prospect. However, on many occasions, right when I really needed to get at something, google aps were simply broken. I'm sure you've seen gmail get into a confused state where you cannot log in. This usually results in you having to clear your browser cache and delete all cookies, though this doesn't always work. Google makes some change somewhere, and then after a while they figure it out and fix it. But they never tell you when to expect downtime. Google just rolls out new code whenever they feel like it and you wind up suffering.
Until they start to run their services more like a production IT shop, I can't see how anyone can run a business on it.
I've been using the free version for months for my small business and it has been awesome. We are a growing company and I think the free version will suite our needs for many years. There are some additional features I'd like to see but they keep on adding more so I expect them in the near future.
We have two locations and this helps bridge the gap between the offices ( I also use Hamachi for remote connectivity)
So far we use gmail, cal and just starting to use docs and spreadsheets.
English doesn't have a unique word for libre (e.g. free as in freedom). So I use libre instead.
People should realize there is more to "free software" than not having to pay money to use it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That really depends on your needs. I know of some small offices that have relatively light office application needs and would be just fine replacing MS Office with Google Apps. For any major company it is clearly a no go because Google Apps just doesn't have all the required functionality. Indeed most of MS Office's market won't be able to make the switch. MS Office has a very big market though, and a lot of users simply don't need all the functionality it offers. Those that can get by with Google Apps instead may be a very small percentage of the MS Office market, but they may still be reasonably large numbers in absolute terms.
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So you're telling me that five years after a user graduates their skills using MS Office products will be more valuable and translate better to whatever the most popular office tool of the day is than using Google Docs? How do you know that by the time they graduate Google Docs won't be the standard? When I was in school the word processor of choice was WordPerfect, does that hinder my ability to use MS Word somehow? For the most part a word processor is a word processor. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. If your university is training you to use any specific tool, instead of teaching you general concepts and skills that you can apply across many different tools, then you should probably drop out now and find a better school.
The reason some universities use MS Office products is because MS gives them huge discounts and it minimizes the support costs as it is what most users have on their home machines. There has been a noticable move towards OpenOffice in recent years because it further reduces costs and the users can have the exact same (up to date) version on their home machine further reducing support issues. This is hampered by the difficulty of migrating formats and making changes in general, and by OpenOffice's lackluster Mac support, which is more important in university settings.
Google docs is offering a way to not only almost the functionality MS Office supplies, but also to handle the support for almost all of it as well as server administration costs and duplicating the benefit of having the same product at home and in school while also eliminating the transport problem. If your university is not evaluating at Google Docs as a potential solution, then you are the on likely to be left behind as technology moves on. MS is doing their best to try to move MS Office to an internet service model as well, so you'd better get used to it.
NPR talked a bit about this last night, and Microsoft Office has a 350M user base, so Google's 100k of converts is just 0.03%. There are always a portion of any company's customers that are dissatisfied and will try something else; Google just cherry picked the easy ones and the rest are not going to come that easy.
That's true, it definitely can't sync with everything yet, which is the biggest obstacle to its adoption. For anyone who's interested, though, I recently found a tool for iCal and GCal: http://blog.spanningsync.com/ Automatically backs up your calendars in case of corruption, but I have been syncing two ways, seamlessly, for weeks now. One step closer!
At my location (not a Publix) the schedule gets emailed out to those who volunteer their email address. I mean, they already type up the schedule in excel on the computer, it's only about 5 more mouse clicks to email it to the "employee schedule" mailing list. The neophytes can still pick up a paper copy, but the instances of "oh I didn't realize I had a shift today" dropped off considerably when people can check their email the night before and double check when their shift is.
moox. for a new generation.
The calendar part is getting better and better, especially the arrival of syncmycal has improved integration with MS Outlook, but it surely doesn't replace it, yet, because Google Calendar cannot sync with everything, yet.
n kforgoogle.html
Yes it can -> http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionli
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein