Redefining Collaboration

Google has recently announced its premier version of Google Apps
for businesses. For $50 per user per year, this service gives a mail account
that has 10 GB of space, an instant messenger, a calendar, Docs &
Spreadsheets and a web page maker. And a start page from where you can manage
them all. And yes-the free version is still there-but with less space and
power. This is a classical marketing model now and should not surprise anyone.

For the premier edition Google has partners who provide products
and services that allow the integration of Google Apps into a diverse set of
environments and processes. These third-party vendors build on Google Apps'
functionality to create custom solutions-for specific business and IT
requirements. And there is a wide range available-from starter packages that
help you integrate Google Apps into your enterprise's current IT setup, or
migrate from existing platforms to the Google Apps one, to proof-of-concept
solutions for a complete Web 2.0 solution. Google is just beginning to showcase
its partner solutions. And there are companies like GE, L'Oreal,
Salesforce.com expressing interest in exploring how Google Apps can be used to
deliver their unique IT needs.

Google Apps offers possibilities-especially for small
businesses which are always online, or have distributed teams trying hard to
collaborate. Administrators can configure the look of the web pages and create
and modify user accounts from the control panel. Users are provided with a
customizable start page from where they can access their mails and schedules.
They can create documents and spreadsheets and invite collaborators to work on
them. They can communicate with each other using Gmail and Google Talk. Google
Apps guarantees 99.9% reliability for its services to its premium users.
Businesses can also register their domains with Google's domain registrar
partners. The domain is automatically configured to work with Google's
services.

So what's exceptional about these collaboration tools?
Microsoft Office allows collaboration too, but it's limited. And there are
many businesses which don't want to bear the cost of having enterprise-class
software and platforms for basic collaboration. And the headache of maintaining
servers and applications is not that of the company, but of Google's. And
there's 24x7 support.

There are other providers. Joyent is a hosted collaboration
suite but compared to the Google juggernaut, it's only marketing is a pricing
of $15 per user per month-for 5 users! Zoho offers the Zoho Virtual Office.
Most of it is free, but the project planner is priced at $12 per month for more
than three users.

So where are providers like this led by Google headed?

The present pricing looks interesting but the real costs would
emerge only when the partner applications start getting integrated.

The pricing is per user-so what happens where workstations are
shared-as is done in many industries now.

The apps are not yet a full fledged productivity suite.
Presentation software and database applications are missing. And that takes away
a lot of work.

And most significantly-this concept works only when all users
can always be connected to the net, at excellent speed and rock steady
reliability. We are not quite there as yet.

So I would wager that the major transition to this form of
computing is somewhat distant. It can be done. There are advantages-else there
would be no one writing about it-but there are also some basics to be fixed.

The author is editor-in-chief of CyberMedia, the publisher of Dataquest.
He can be reached at shyamm@cybermedia.co.in