Google Mail & Apps for CORPORATE use

[Bobby Dazzler]

I know we have more than our fair share of IT folks and knowledgable business people, and so I'm hoping one of you might have come across the use of Google Mail & Apps for CORPORATE use, either having been involved in the implementation of it, or as user of it.

All thoughts welcomed!!

 

[A-AvantGarde]

I know we have more than our fair share of IT folks and knowledgable business people, and so I'm hoping one of you might have come across the use of Google Mail & Apps for CORPORATE use, either having been involved in the implementation of it, or as user of it.

All thoughts welcomed!!

Funny you mention that, I'm meeting with someone from Google enterprise this afternoon to discuss this

They recently won a very large account from Rentokil Initial.

Have only had a look at Google docs from within Google Mail. If you've got any questions let me know - meeting with them at 1pm...

 

[Bobby Dazzler]

I literally started thinking about this at about 0855 this morning, so I don't even know what I want to know yet!! I'll have a think.

Anything you can share would be interesting though.

 

[Bobby Dazzler]

The one thing that's right at the tip of my tongue is security.

I've noticed on couple of occasions headlines regarding compromised security of Google Docs, and that's resonating at the back of my mind. Google offer some reassurance on their Coporate page, but it would be interesting to find out more on security - that could be a showstopper if the risk is too high.

I also noticed that the cost is annual, which you would expect for a hosted service, but that might reduce overall cost effectiveness over the longer term compared to a one-off MS licence purchase.

For those organisations who don't upgrade on each release - and instead choose to sweat their purchases little more, for example upgrading office every second generation - this could make Google Apps look like an expensive alternative.

As I say anything you find out would be of interest.

 

[BTB 500]

I would personally be looking for some major guarantees around security/confidentiality.

 

[timskemp]

Cloud computing is in my opinion NOT suitable for larger enterprises. I'm starting a new venture myself and will be using Google Apps / Mail for that, which is what I recommend for any business now with under about 20 users, however I have another project to roll out for 400 users and the client (who has it's own IT department - long story) is not even considering cloud / shared platform solutions, despite the huge capex advantages.

It's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist at the moment, the correct solution for any larger organisation tends to revolve around sticking stuff in datacentres and operating from there, I certainly wouldn't trust business critical comms and storage to Google or any other third party, and I'd be interested to see what kind of business continuity insurance you can get if you do...

The G Apps platform does fail, as do others (see the current Sidekick / MS issues, and previous big Blackberry outages) so centering a businesses comms on something outside of its own control may not be sensible.

 

[A-AvantGarde]

Cloud computing is in my opinion NOT suitable for larger enterprises. QUOTE]

That's always been (& probably to an extent still is) my opinion. However as you've said if I was a startup it would be very different.

Having said that many corporates are starting to adopt Cloud services (or Software as a Service), anyone remember ASP

We have about 2,500 users across 40 sites in the UK. On top of that we have operations in Europe (Benelux & Eastern) as well as the Middle East, again another 2,000 users.

I've used Cloud type services (if you want to use that phrase) for hosted email security. Moving on from that Hosted Exchange does seem to make sense in some cases.

Interesting times, conceptually it sounds good - having said that I would probably say that as almost all of the large IT environments I've managed have been deployed predominantly using Citrix.

 

[Dryce]

Having said that many corporates are starting to adopt Cloud services (or Software as a Service), anyone remember ASP

Anyone remember bureau computing?

 

[st13phil]

Anyone remember bureau computing?

Yup. And with no affection. (BTW, I think we're showing our age )

 

[Ade B]

Been on google apps for about 6 weeks.

Google mail is brilliant (not that I've much experience of any other), seems very stable so far on free version (we'll upgrade when I start to run out of space) & works seamlessly with iPhone.

The apps don't get any use apart from occasionally the PDF viewer..

Ade