Google Apps in the Enterprise

In reading the article, Google takes a more unorthodox approach to presenting it SaaS solution to enterprises. By focusing on making the enterprise apps simple and easy to use, they overlook the complex needs of many organizations. But, in googles defense, they are able to adapt and change quickly with the business environment.

The idea of dealing with chaos in the enterprise business environment baffles me. Google's approach is to just search to find things rather than organize them in a meaningful structure. For A type personalities and those that need this structure, this system will be difficult to adapt to. By organizing data, I think it is easier for humans to see relationships in data. By searching on random keywords, these relationships can get missed or be clouded from view.

Taking control from the organization will be a huge change for many. With "willy-nilly" realease schedules, or those schedules deemed by google, suddenly take control away from IT with regards to upgrades, maintenance, and downtime. And not having a choice on new feature sets will drive many organizations crazy!

A replacement for office you say? If organizations do simple word documents or excel sheets without anything fancy, I could understand this statement. A "lite" version may hit most users but Office 2007 can produce amazing business literature using fonts, formats, graphics, and templates. But, Office does not support collaboration of files (OneNote is the exception) whereas this is one great strength of Google apps. Google Apps has a long way to go if they are to complete with Microsoft as a replacement technology without being able to support all levels of users in an organization. But, for 1 year of development, Google is doing well.

The mobile office and working off-line are interesting concepts to consider. With the ability to work offline, users are free to work from wherever as long as they have an internet connection. Now if the organization loses their internet connection for a few hours, EVERY user must work offline. This is much more detrimental to an organization. And, like the article mentioned, reimbursing employees for internet can be quite costly.

The product strengths of GAPE are relevant and good selling points for Google. But, possible enterprise customers should really look into what GAPE will not do for the organization. With 99.9% uptime for email only, as a customer, this would make me nervous. If my business relies on these apps to do business, I would expect the same uptime for all applications. And the clause for "not responsible for lost data, profits, or revenue" would make me think twice. With my IT staff, I can at least ensure backups are performed at regular intervals. With Google, who knows!

Google does have one thing going for them- their name. Google is an innovative company that has branded itself as the new hightech king of the web. Google has partnerships that will allow the software to evolve quickly and fill in the holes where it's GAPE products are deficit. With their always new and innovative technologies, Google will allow GAPE to go in directions that Microsoft and other companies could only dream of.

The evaluation of a SaaS based framework was definately a good point. To compare apples to apples, organizations can evaluate SaaS products to see if they meet the business needs. A slow approach to the decisionmaking process and evaluating alternatives are a must before investing in a SaaS products. SaaS products can reduce the TCO for an organization by alleviating the headaches of maintenance and upgrades. Access to Googles API's and services like SSO are certainly good features that organizations should consider during the evaluation process.

Overall, an organization really needs to look at it's current infrastructure and business needs to see if Googles GAPE solution would work for them. Google's GAPE has great simple features that would cater to most business users but falls short in the richness and ability to cater to more complex needs and power users.