Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps

Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"

Comments

Google looking ahead to Wave of future

[RyanHam]

Google appear to be actually focusing on emails replacement and to me it looks very promising: Wave combines email, instant messaging and collaboration. You can run it on googles servers or on your own. Its very promising. Google Wave http://wave.google.com/ Common irritations with email, - replying to one person, reply to the group, making sure everyones included - trying to coordinate on one document via email and contant back forth emails

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[blincoln]

As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking.
[snip]
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?

It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.

It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.