The search engine’s latest software bundle builds a rudimentary social graph where workers can collaborate and share documents…
“Google is releasing its new Team Edition of Google Apps — which could make life both harder and easier for IT departments…”
Google on Thursday plans to offer a new edition of its hosted applications suite that end-users can bring into the workplace without the involvement of their IT department.
The new release of the hosted applications suite will allow employees to set up “Google Apps” workgroups if they have e-mail addresses within their company’s domain. The collaborative groups can be set up without the involvement of IT personnel, although some controls are offered.
“Google Apps Team Edition is a free service that lets people within the same e-mail domain collaborates easily with Google Apps.”
The free Team Edition includes Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets and presentations; Google Calendar for schedules and events publication; Google Talk for instant messaging; and a Start Page to preview Calendar and Docs and to add gadgets. But Team Edition does not include Gmail, which would require technical personnel for implementation.
Upon logging in to Google Apps Team Edition, a user can identify other Google Apps users in his or her organization and can easily invite colleagues to share documents and calendars. Google Apps, in other words, has gained the makings of a rudimentary social graph, as social network friend lists are called.
The new release, is aimed at employees who are interested in using Google Apps but whose employers have not signed up for it, said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.
While establishing collaborative workgroups in a third-party hosted environment might ease some of the burden faced by a company’s technical staff, Yankee Group analyst Laura Didio pointed out that it also raises some red flags.
The good news, she said, “is that employees can set it up” — which is also the bad news.
“After confirming that you belong to that organization, it is easy to invite others people from your company and start collaborating,” said the official Google blog.
“It means that IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.”
As one example, she noted that healthcare or financial companies might have compliance regulations that have to be observed, even in off-site collaborative groups.
She pointed out that the information shared or generated will often be stored in a hosted environment beyond the company’s firewall. Companies, she said, “will have to revise their procedures for security and for compliance.”
“Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement,” Sheth said.
Unlike IM applications, which open communication to anyone on the Web using a compatible IM app, Google Apps Team Edition lets you share with people only in your same organization.
Google’s stand-alone hosted apps for consumers have not really made a splash in the corporate world, largely because of the security threats posed by how easy they make it to share sensitive work data with people outside the company.
So Google created Google Apps, a free Standard Edition and a Premier Edition that has a fee. These editions give an administrator control over how the apps are used, allowing for services to be disabled, new services like Gmail to be added, and integration with apps for things like single sign-on. Google offers security and government regulation compliance services for those editions 9789901 through its Postini acquisition.
So far, more than 500,000 mostly small organizations have signed up for Google Apps, but the other versions Standard, Education, Partner and Premier require IT to implement the suite because its services are linked to an organization’s Internet domain.
Once signed up with Team Edition, people can see who else in their organization’s Internet domain is also a user, and invite those who are not, Sheth said.
“It provides a quick way for workgroups to start collaborating,” he said.
Organizations do need a level of security and control, said Google software engineer Justin Sadowski on The Official Google Blog. Team Edition, he wrote allows employees “to choose to share information just with each other, and not with outsiders, and it lets IT departments actively manage Google Apps, so admins can customize the Google Apps experience for users, including who should have access and which applications are available.”
For users who want more control, Google said on its Web site, an administrator would just need to sign up for Team Edition with his or her work address and “verify that you manage your domain.” The controls include managing which applications are allowed and who should have access to what, whether sharing is allowed outside the domain, and setting up integration with the user directory and single sign-on systems.
By encouraging users to invite colleagues and to share documents, Google is simultaneously lightening the burden on administrators and taking them out of the application adoption equation. Such user-driven IT has not been universally embraced, but organizations like Gartner nevertheless see it as inevitable.
Didio added that the Google suite “has been a real hit among SMBs,” or small and midsize businesses, so the impact of a Team Edition could be substantial.
IT groups will become more user-driven, with more than half of all IT buying decisions being made to accommodate end-users by 2010, Gartner predicted in a recent report. “The rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of the browser interface have made computing approachable and individuals are now making decisions about technology for personal and business use," Gartner said.
IT departments should not get angry about Team Edition, according to Sheth, because, unlike other software that employees use without IT approval, it provides an upgrade path to IT-manageable versions.
“The IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this,” Sheth said. “This is a solid, happy medium.”
The search giant has said that companies can also upgrade to other editions, which allow more controls by internal staff. Like the Team Edition, the Standard Edition and Education Edition are free, and the Premier Edition, which costs “US$50 per user per year” with additional controls, is $50 per user annually.
However, Team Edition will be far from alone among the hosted software that employees use in their organizations without getting approval from the IT department, said Erica Driver, a Forrester Research analyst.
The IT department reactions to Team Edition will depend on the organization’s culture, which ranges from those in “lockdown mode” to those more tolerant and aware that Web 2.0 technologies are seeping in from the consumer world to the workplace, Driver said.
Google appears to be counting on user evangelism both to wean workers away from applications like Microsoft Office that appear by fiat on corporate desktops and to overcome resistance from change-averse IT administrators.
Team Edition, with its bottom-up, end-user-driven focus, fits in with Google’s traditional strategy of appealing to individuals, grown out of its consumer services, and will likely boost the adoption of Google Apps in companies, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations that don’t currently use the suite, said Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst.
“The Google model is to prime the well at the end-user level and assist IT somewhere along the way, but the demand generation for the suite will definitely be at the rank-and-file level, not at the IT level,” Cain said.
“Google Apps Team Edition is another on ramp” to Web-hosted apps, said Jeremy Milo, senior marketing manager for Google Apps. “They are one more way for businesses to get comfortable with computing in the cloud and anywhere, any time access to critical information.”
“For IT organizations that have not actually signed up for Google Apps themselves, a lot of their users are already using our consumer applications,” said Sheth. “Google Apps Team Edition kind of provides a protective wrapper around this. It gives an IT organization an easy way to bring this in and start administering it.”