Google moves into business apps

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Starting on Monday, organisations will be able to offer members or employees Web-based email, calendar, chat and Web page publishing hosted by Google for free.

Google is now offering a beta version of Google Apps for Your Domain, which includes Gmail with 2 gigabytes of storage, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Page Creator.

The new service is an extension of Gmail for Your Domain, a service that Google launched in beta version in February. It allows organisations to use Gmail applications with their own email address, instead of the "@gmail.com" domain.

The Gmail for Your Domain test service has tens of thousands of active domains, hundreds of thousands of users and hundreds of universities registered to use it, said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google's enterprise business.

The Google Apps for Your Domain service will allow organisations to outsource their communications applications to Google and to customise the user interface with their own branding and colour scheme. Administrators will have access to an English-language Web-based control panel to do things such as manage the user account list and set up aliases and distribution lists.

A premium edition with support and additional storage will be available by the end of the year for a fee, Girouard said. He declined to provide more details.

Talkback

We at Ipswitch are great admirers of Google and customers of theirs, too. Gmail is an elegant and useful service, and it's hard to argue with a corporate motto of "Don't be Evil," but businesses should have some hard questions for Google and for themselves when faced with Hosted Gmail The questions mostly fall out of the shared nature of Gmail - when you buy Gmail, even if you use your own domain, your email is spread across Google's distributed computing architecture. Some businesses will be ok with that, some will not.
Businesses have lots of choices in hosted email that are attractive for different reasons. Although they bring good technology and a great brand, Google is late to this game. Some will want to use a local provider and keep their money and their tech support contacts, close by. Some will prefer the mixture of control and touchless ease that comes with dedicated hosting from providers like Rackspace. And some, probably many, will decide that Gmail provides the best value for them.

via Facebook 29 August, 2006 14:08
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