So, just what the heck is Google Apps?

Is it a collection of slick tools that appeal to users, but fall a little short for rigorous enterprise use? Or is it an engaging set of services that not only enables, but encourages employees to collaborate in a variety of contexts?

The answer is probably a little of both.

In a Burton Group report on the potential of Google Apps in the enterprise, published last April, author Guy Creese notes that it isn’t clear whether Apps is intended primarily for collaboration, content management or communication. While it contains elements of all three, says Creese, none of its features are robust enough to make Apps a replacement for products typically used by enterprises.

For instance, while the premier edition of Apps supports archiving and management of e-mail, thanks to Google’s purchase of e-mail security specialist Postini in 2007, there is no built-in functionality for archiving and managing documents such as spreadsheets, a key requirement for companies concerned about compliance requirements or potential litigation. The absence of such functionality might be a deal-breaker for companies hoping to employ Apps for content management, says Creese. While he praises Apps’ clean and easy-to-use interface, he believes these kinds of functionality gaps show Google is still grappling with producing solutions that satisfy enterprise needs.

Yet the typical enterprise user cares more about ease of use than a long list of features, says Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager. “If you ask users the difference between an enterprise content management system, a collaboration system and a productivity suite, they probably wouldn’t care. They just want to be able to do their jobs better.”

That’s what Apps enables, says Chandra. He cites features such as e-mail with embedded calendaring and instant messaging and Sites, which allows users to upload any content type, including Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, to a Web site. “Workers today need to collaborate via a whole host of content types. We want to make that as easy as possible and include search capabilities to make it easy for them to find the information they need.”

“It’s the whole concept of providing ‘good enough’ applications vs. the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ you get with (Microsoft’s) Office and other productivity suites,” says Mark Koenig, a vice president of Saugatuck Technology. “Why pay for all those features if 80 or 90 percent of them aren’t used? That’s a real value proposition: Why are you paying for the other stuff, or why are you paying for stuff for everybody in the organization when there are only a few power users that need it?”

If it's good enough at home ...

Google’s consumer roots are a strength, says Chandra. “We’re able to roll out services to millions of users in the consumer space, test them out, make sure they are beneficial to end users and then roll them out to the enterprise, adding the security and reliability that companies need.”

Creese, however, sees them as a liability. From his report: “Google hands consumer-oriented applications to the enterprise division with instructions to make them work for corporations. This ‘hand-me-down’ approach leads to suboptimal design from an enterprise point of view, and to a lot of rework. Only if and when the enterprise division stands architecturally on its own will Google be able to compete head-to-head with competitors who have focused on the enterprise from the beginning.”

Google’s “constant stream of innovation” yields frequent incremental updates such as the recent addition of Google Analytics to Apps, which allows companies to gauge the popularity and usage patterns of documents, says Chandra. Google recognizes it needs to keep systems administrators better notified of additions and changes to Apps and is working on methods to do so. For instance, it launched an RSS feed in October.

While Google's rapid iteration model allows the product to morph quickly, Creese points out it can also delay features if customers didn't ask for them initially. Also, he says, companies like to know which new features are in the pipeline so they can tweak their processes to take advantage of them.

That may be true, says Chandra, but “when the tradeoff is being stuck with old technology, I think many companies will want to move to a more flexible platform.”
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