Google this week took the "beta" tag off Google Apps products like Gmail and
Google Calendar "to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite," another milestone on the extended road metaphor that is the search giant's strategy for inserting itself fully into enterprise-class IT environments.
Acknowledging "boulders along the road" that have hindered the adoption of Google Apps by large enterprises, Google Apps Senior Project Manager Rajen Sheth writes on the Google Enterprise Blog that the company has discovered the "dynamite that cleared the road to Apps" for large organizations -- enterprise contact management, offline access, and support for BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook.
"Today we're paving the road," Sheth concludes. And a good thing, too, because we were starting to wonder if we'd have to take the train -- but a call to Google Enterprise spokesman Andrew Kovacs added some more details to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's cloud computing agenda.
"We added mail retention [to Gmail] and archiving through Postini for legal discovery, as well as mail delegation, which is of particular value to administrative assistants who want to send e-mail for their boss," Kovacs said, highlighting several enterprise-targeted additions to Google's Gmail Premier Edition.
But the Google Apps office suite is also scaling the other way, Kovacs said. Live Replication for Gmail and Google Calendar is now available to businesses of all sizes -- previously the data duplication service had been marketed to very large organizations.
The search giant has also fixed a bug in Google Apps Sync for Microsoft that reportedly caused isolated problems with Windows Desktop Search and some plug-ins, Kovacs said, downplaying the problem's severity. The issue came to light about a week after Google's early June unveiling of its improved method for delivering the Outlook e-mail client interface via its hosted Gmail back end as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server.
"The larger context is that we tested [Google Apps Sync for Microsoft] with more than 100 businesses. Windows Desktop Search did not emerge as an issue for them," Kovacs said. "But we worked with Microsoft to fix it, even though I'm not sure who that was ever an issue for. So the idea that the product had a problem, we take issue with."
Fair enough -- the important thing is that Google didn't tell the complainers to "hit the road, Jack."
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
