First Version of Google Business Apps Google released the first version of Google Apps for Your Domain offering hosted, web-based, free, but ad-supported services including email, talk, calendar, and pages.

'A set of hosted applications for organizations that want to provide high quality communications tools to their users without the hassle of installing and maintaining software or hardware.'

Those applications are already out for a while, however the new thing is a web-based administration interface for creating user accounts and assigning permissions. It targets the small- and medium-sized businesses that want to communicate and share information more effectively while drastically reducing maintenance costs.

Although I'm not using Pages at all, Google Apps are excellent AJAX-based communications tools reducing the amount of friction to interact with eachother and to improve communications. The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web and I think it's a first step to a Web-based collaboration-suite with an option to buy further premium services later on.

Before using Google Apps one should read the terms and conditions carefully and think of questions about privacy, ethics, security and technology support. It might also be interesting what happens in case of an outage or data losses. I would also like to see an integration of Blogger, a tool to instantly take part in a worldwide live-communication. For the instance the service is in beta and this means according to Google:

'Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)'.

Labels: productivity

  ¶ 'First Version of Google Business Apps' posted by eA : 8:12 PM