Home > Applications

Computerworld -

With limited IT budgets and technical staffs, some small and midsize businesses have started kicking the tires of Google Inc.'s free, Web-based Google Apps for Your Domain desktop application suite. Some early users said last week that the software works well in smaller operations.

Larger companies, on the other hand, may be somewhat wary of buying hosted key applications from the search-engine provider, users and analysts said.

Joe Poole, technical support manager at Boscov's Department Store LLC, a Reading, Pa.-based retailer, said that there's "not much chance" that his company would use the new offering from Google. "If we need inexpensive office software, we use OpenOffice," he said.

"At this point, the large enterprise looks at this and says, I've kind of got this covered'" with an Exchange server, instant messaging and other IT software, said Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Alejandro Pivaral, CIO at Miami-based 2night Entertainment Corp., said he expects that his company can dump an e-mail server and its associated expenses after signing up its 100 employees for the alpha version of Google's free suite.

"I don't use Outlook anymore," Pivaral said. "I only use Gmail," Google's free hosted e-mail service.

Pivaral said he installed test versions of the new Google offerings earlier this year because they were free, but he has since found additional value.

A beta version of Google's suite of hosted applications was launched last week for small and midsize businesses. The suite will be expanded by year's end with capabilities for larger companies. The corporate versions will carry as yet undisclosed fees, said Matthew Glotzbach, Google's enterprise division products manager. The product suite includes the Gmail software and Google's Calendar, Talk and Page Creator applications.

Student E-mail System

Michael Renzi, director of finance and administration at San Jose City College, said the school began using an alpha version of the suite in February and has already created the school's first e-mail system for its 11,000 students.

Google Apps

Applications for small and midsize businesses include the following: Gmail e-mail software with up to 2GB of storage per user, search tools and instant messaging capabilities Google Talk instant messaging software A Google Calendar event organizer that can share data with other users The Google Page Creator Web site design tool

"It's providing them with services that we haven't been able to provide before" because of budget restrictions, he said. Renzi said the two-year college had hoped to build such e-mail capabilities over the past several years but hadn't been able to gain funding for the project.

So far, Renzi said, "it's working out great. There are, of course, things that we have to change," including some work processes. But those adjustments are expected and are being made, he added.

Renzi said he's not sure how much money the college has saved by using the hosted Google applications, but "there's no question that it's saved thousands of dollars."

Paul Sculthorpe, a senior Web developer at Rock Kitchen Harris in Leicester, England, said that his company began using Google Apps several weeks ago when its internal mail server died.

Sculthorpe said the Google system was "painless to set up and means we can get on with other things."

The company is looking for Google to improve the Gmail software's spam folder, said Sculthorpe. "We've had a few important e-mails go into the spam folder," he said.

Also, he said, "there has been some [internal] concern over privacy and things. My general answer to that is that I trust Google to take better backups than we ever could."

Read more about Applications in Computerworld's Applications Topic Center.