Companies should be wary of low-priced Google office suite, study says

Computerworld - At just $50 a year per user, Google Inc.'s Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) hosted office productivity suite could be one of the cheapest mistakes a large business makes.

That's one of the conclusions of a study by the Burton Group, which said GAPE offers lots of good value for business users, but lacks strong regulatory compliance features and poor administrative tools for user accounts. That means a quick deployment in a large business could be a "career-limiting move" for IT staffers who advocate its use without knowing of its shortcomings.

In his 55-page study, Guy Creese, an analyst at the Midvale, Utah-based analyst firm, said that GAPE has energized the market for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. But it is primarily based on a similar free, consumer-focused Google Apps productivity suite that doesn't convert easily for large corporate use.

"Initially combining a portal, e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, document sharing and concurrent document creation -- all for the price of $50 per user per year -- the solution rapidly caught enterprises' imaginations," Creese wrote. "Unfortunately, quickly adopting GAPE without understanding its quirks or looking at other alternatives is likely to become a career-limiting move."

While usability is generally good -- except for users who build complex spreadsheets -- critical data security and regulatory compliance features are missing, Creese said in an interview today. "I would say that a lot of people would view this as a potential [Microsoft] Office replacement," he said. "One of the main sorts of architectural problems Google has right now is that these products were created for consumers."

As a result, IT administrators can't add users in groups with the same general rights, making the creation and administration of user accounts slow and cumbersome because they have to be set up individually, Creese said. "If you're a large enterprise looking to deploy this corporatewide, it is an issue."

On the records management and compliance issue, Google is not the only SaaS vendor with shortcomings, Creese said. "Typically, I get major silence" when vendors are asked how they deal with those issues, he said.

Google's offering allows spreadsheets to be saved and preserved in groups for later access, although word processing documents can only be saved individually, a time-consuming process, Creese said. "And that gets legal departments nervous [because] they're on the hook for the documents" with no easy way to retrieve them. "For a small to medium-size business, that's not a big thing. But for a large business, that doesn't really cut it."

Not all the news is bad, though, according to Creese.

While GAPE may not yet be fully featured for large business users, Google "has done a service to the marketplace by legitimizing this" approach, he said. Other major vendors, such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- with its popular Office suite -- are moving into the SaaS office productivity market on Google's heels, adding credibility to the concept. "I think a large part of this is just the brand recognition that Google gets with this. But I am not convinced that they will ultimately win the battle."