Good Bye Beta – Welcome Google Apps for Enterprise

Just in. According to the Official Google Enterprise Blog, beta label came off Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. With this move, Google sets new standard and shows the business that it’s cloud offering is mature enough for the Enterprise beyond reasonable doubt.

“Google Apps has always been a compelling offering for small and medium sized companies, and they’ve accounted for much of our growth to 1.75 million businesses. Large enterprises can also get great results with Apps, as Fairchild Semiconductor and the dozens of other big companies that have Gone Google have discovered. Still, we appreciate that there have been some boulders along the road to adoption for the largest businesses in the world.
Since the beginning of the year, we’ve focused on making it as easy as possible for those large enterprises to switch to Google, and offline access, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook support, and enterprise contact management were the dynamite that cleared the road to Apps.

Today we’re paving the road. We’re taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.

We’re also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we’re adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.”

New email and admin features are a big step forward considering that Gmail is delivered as a web-client. Read full story.

As always, over the next several weeks our team will test new fucntionality, and will share its findings with our valued readers.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz