Business workgroup tools added to Google Apps

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Google has announced an expansion to its web-based suite of office and communications software, Google Apps, in an effort to make the product more enterprise-friendly and relevant.

Google Apps Team Edition adds additional collaborative and team work features to the 18-month-old software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite, which initially only allowed users to share documents only with other individual users, but lacked many of the sophisticated group management features required by businesses.

"We basically removed the notion of an administrator," said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, the company's business software unit.

"Everybody is on an equal footing. Any user can share a document with all the users."

IT managers have emerged as the disciplinarians of corporate life, enforcing policies needed to manage increasingly complicated systems as efficiently as possible in budget-constrained organisations.

Google has become a popular, albeit disruptive provider of web search and software tools inside businesses by targeting users as consumers and gaining access to the enterprise that way, instead of seeking to appeal to technology decision makers through formal sales.

Only in the past year or so has Google embarked on a strategy to win over more progressive IT administrators.

Google Apps Team Edition security features remain rudimentary, but the company is moving rapidly to add features. While it currently has little notion of central administrative control, individual document creators can say who can see any particular document.

Nonetheless, Apps still lacks many features for designing, prioritising and controlling changes that different users make in any document.

Content management software programs such as Microsoft's SharePoint offer such features. Google is working on SharePoint-like features, executives said.

Analysts said Google Apps for teams is a promising start to an increasingly aggressive web-based collaboration strategy to compete against Microsoft in business software. Microsoft has responded to Google Apps with a similar product called Office Live Workspace.

Erica Driver, an analyst with Forrester said team collaboration has been a crucial missing piece from Google Apps and more must be done.

"Google needs to evolve more of a concept of groups and some concept of access controls that allows users to check in and out documents and decide who can read, write or edit them," Driver said. "Some users may be working on sensitive documents. Not everyone in a company can have access to everything."

"If it is going to appeal within business enterprises, Google has to play nice with IT. Google still has to convince companies that they are to be trusted," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with software tracking firm Nucleus Research.

Google's Glotzbach said Google Apps Team Edition can be upgraded to versions that can be controlled by central administrators. These require organisations to pay small per-user monthly fees.

Thus Google Apps can be incorporated in a single sign-on password system or other filtering and security systems that companies are adopting to guard against rogue employees.

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