All Annotations of Google Apps for SMB's[Preview]

saved by17 people, first byEmanuele Quintarelli on 2008-03-01, last bySean Brady on 2008-08-13

• Google is actually going about marketing to the enterprise market in a pretty ingenious way - they're not. Instead, they're bypassing the IT department (who would, in all honesty, probably laugh at the thought) and marketing their suite on the sly directly to the employees themselves:

• Ben Worthen's commented in today's Wall Street Journal about the product:

  
  
  

  "Setting up sites like this has traditionally required help from the information-technology department. Google boasts in its press release that workers can set up a site 'without having to burden IT for support.

• I think this has its place for collaboration scenarios whereby the content that is being collaborated is not that sensitive
• "It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,"
• CIO Fear #3: The Google TOS
• Even with the addition of Google Sites, Google isn't offering Sharepoint-like functionality. For those that don't know, "Sharepoint" isn't just online collaboration and document sharing. It's a suite of products and technologies that offer functionality and access to all data across all applications, even line-of-business applications.
• "From within Outlook you can instantly pull up a customer, get a dozen looks on their activity or prior orders, find direct links to people closer to the products with email, phone or IM access immediately from tags in the documents and answer any question the customer has, period. Can you do that with Google apps? I don't believe so, but you can collaborate. big whoop. You can setup a network share and collaborate just as easily with what you already have and not investing in Google apps for that matter, if you want very limited functionality. MOSS blows Google apps away and does NOT cost more over the long run and provides much richer environment, many more tools to collaborate with, easily interface our BI data to all users with complete and great administrative controls, which Google lacks even for simply document sharing(wheee), a managed code runtime and services that allow your end users to all have an Office GUI, not just an office tool, to look at any data on the network, at any time, in any way they need to...I repeat, smart companies are looking beyond initial cost to cost and ROI over minimum 5 years. That is where Google starts to cost A LOT more..."
• 62% of U.S. businesses use Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software, compared with less than 1% for corporate webmail like Google
• has a good chance to completely backfire on them.
• Google claims that the purpose of Team Edition is to allow users to “share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support,” are more likely to be greeted by raised eyebrows from the IT department. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, the unapproved presence and use of Google Apps Team Edition could, in fact, increase the burden on IT support staff. Google seems to be betting that if it can build enough grassroots support for Google Apps, IT departments and corporations will have no choice but to embrace it as a provider. Such an approach may work beautifully in the consumer market, but there’s no guarantee corporations will be as flexible."
• These remarks are solely my opinion alone, but it's likely they're influenced by my previous experience as a MCSE-certified systems administrator!
• The way I see it, if IT departments were doing their jobs (and some are) there would be no need to be having this discussion. They would be sufficiently user-centric to decide on the best product for their users needs,
• For too long CIOs have been technology centric on the one hand and compliance driven on the other.
• As someone who had long experience with SharePoint, I would like to say the product is expensive both in infrastructure and in licensing, too heavy and lacks enough functionality. Any time you upgrade to a newer version you need to build again most of the old intranet sites. In addition, there are critical scalability issues that can be solved only with more expensive solutions and infrastructure.
  
  This is why I think Google will win in the long run in this arena, and the large companies will be the last to use its services, since they have money and CIOs that can afford to spend money on Microsoft solutions.
  
  Startups and small businesses will prefer cost-effective solutions and will compromise the security risk.
• experience with SharePoint, I would like to say the product is expensive both in infrastructure and in licensing, too heavy and lacks enough functionality. Any time you upgrade to a newer version you need to build again most of the old intranet sites. In addition, there are critical scalability issues
• Thanks for this long post Sarah. I goes a long way to demonstrate how flawed Google Apps is but really fails to find one single point of disadvantage in using such a brilliant technology that, after all, is ONLY one year old. How good MS was after one year? How many clients did MS have after one year? Don't you or your readers realize that your post is completely bias?
  
  Also, one massive point missed by your blog is the essence of cloud computing: a product doesn't need to be perfect when released; it relies on the fact that, given its nature, companies can continuously improve it without having to install or wait for a patch or a new release. What we are facing is a real revolution and no blog written by a scared Microsoft employee can change history.
• "CIO Fear #3: The Google TOS" is very misleading. She's quoting the Google terms of service, not the Google Apps terms of service. If you're using the free version of Google Apps those terms apply, but the Premier Edition, which is what any company with an actual CIO would buy, is completely different and does not have this clause or reference to the general Google TOS at all. This is an extremely important distinction, which I can only think was intentionally omitted from the post.
• Google Apps Premier (the paid version) is much less expensive than even a hosted version of Exchange. Most small and mid-sized companies don't run their own Exchange servers, or do extensive customization, or really use anything other than Email, Calendaring, and Contact management. Even if you include the cost of 3rd. party tools to insure good interoperation between Google Apps and Outlook you're still going to come in much cheaper than even the cheapest hosted Exchange service. If you assume the customer is going to run their own Exchange server then the cost difference is much, much greater.

• on 2008-08-13 Beahgo
  This hammers the point that perhaps this is not the option we want!
• on 2008-08-30 Tlaloc
  The bottom line - to get better Terms of Service for Google Apps, we need to switch to Google Apps Premier that charges $50 per user per year. For companies like Pardes or Dov, we can easily have them switch after a few months of use seeing how cool Google Apps is. For 30 employees, paying for Google Apps premier is only $1500 per year. Considering how much costs to run a server with Exchange and how much is not done with Outlook that is done with Gmail (only spam protection would be worth it), it may make a good sense. What do you think?