Will The Enterprise Love Non-Beta Google Apps?
The four pillars of Google Apps -Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Talk are no longer in beta. Will this finally remove the barrier to enterprise adoption of Google’s cloud productivity tools?
In June, Google introduced Google Apps Synch for Microsoft Outlook, a plug-in that lets GAPE customers access Gmail, calendar and contacts through Microsoft Outlook.
These were all key moves in helping Fairchild Semiconductor switch to GAPE for its 18 offices all over the world, Glotzbach said. Fairchild executives were unavailable to comment on this move; Glotzbach said the company wanted a more modern collaboration platform.
Fairchild – a series of pilots
Fairchild started with a proof-of-concept phase of 50 users moved on to an early adopter phase of 400 users worldwide. Finally, the remaining employees to Google Apps to Lotus Notes in less than three weeks.
Glotzbach also said Google is testing new features for GAPE customers, including mail delegation and mail retention. Mail delegation allows administrative assistants to screen and send e-mail on behalf of other knowledge workers.
E-mail retention lets IT administrators set up policies to determine when e-mail will be purged, a utility designed with data retention rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley in mind. These tools will start rolling out to all GAPE domains over the next weeks.
Replication boosts reliability
Finally, Google is boosting the reliability of Google Apps, which suffered from a handful of widely publicised outages in the last year, by providing live replication of data to other locations for near instant disaster recovery.
This replication simultaneously serves a user’s e-mail and calendar data from two different data centre locations at all times. This service is performed for all Gmail users, not just GAPE customers.
But for those users who aren’t ready to bid the beta tag goodbye, Google said users can re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.
