Google Apps, Not Yet a Mature Enterprise Solution

An interesting report from Burton Group titled "Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects?" (it's available as a PDF, but requires free registration) analyzes if the business edition of Google Apps is a good solution for the corporate environment.

The report starts with a short description of Google's offering: "Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) is a SaaS-based solution; a member of the Google Apps family; a collection of applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), third-party applications, and support; and supplied by a company where historically selling to the enterprise has been a corporate sideline." Google doesn't make too much money from enterprise products and it tries to adapt consumer-oriented applications to the corporate needs. "Only if and when the enterprise division stands architecturally on its own will Google be able to compete head-to-head with competitors who have focused on the enterprise from the beginning," suggests the report.

Google Apps is presented as a "lite" replacement for Microsoft Office and a basic option for an enterprise content management system or a collaboration suite. Google Apps can't address the needs of Microsoft Office power users, doesn't offer tools for document archiving, records management, stats, content policies. It also lacks collaboration tools like video chat, web conferencing, workspaces for collaboration, wikis, forums, although some of these will be added in the near future.

Google "has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a known only to Google schedule. Furthermore, some companies are leery of entrusting their corporate documents to a company that makes its living from analyzing content and displaying it to the world. To these companies, keeping information secure seems at odds with Google's emphasis on information sharing."

Here are the product strengths, according to the report:

* Don't need to pay for unnecessary power user licenses
* No software to install, and no continual updates
* Minimal, if any, training required
* Relatively easy to include workers outside the enterprise
* Online documents are not scattered on C drives or fileshares
* Integration of past application silos

... and here are the weaknesses:

* Power users and sophisticated documents are not supported
* Records management is difficult and requires extra work
* 99.9% uptime guarantee is for Gmail only
* Google is not liable for lost data, profits, or revenue
* Live telephone support is 17/5
* Difficult to plan for product capabilities and rollouts

To be fair, the text from the service agreement is very similar to Microsoft Office's terms: "In no event will Google or its licensors be liable for any indirect, special, incidental, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, including but not limited to damages for lost data, lost profits, lost revenue or costs of procurement of substitute goods or services, however caused and under any theory of liability."

The conclusion is that Google Apps is not yet a mature solution and companies should wait until Google or other competing software-as-a-service suites become more powerful:

Google has caught the attention of enterprises with its inexpensive Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) product: available at $50 per user per year. However, the seductive price can spell trouble for enterprise architects and their companies if they don't do their homework: the solution's rudimentary feature set means that enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly.

While Google's entrance is adding momentum to using software as a service (SaaS) for communication, collaboration, and content management, it's unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.

Explore the Sky in Google Earth

Google Earth goes beyond its initial purpose and has a new feature that lets you explore the sky. The latest version (Google Earth 4.2) brings what could've been a separate program for rendering the sky, like Stellarium.

After launching the application, click on the black rounded icon from the toolbar and switch to the sky mode. Google Earth shows the sky from the current location and becomes a virtual telescope for amateur stargazers.

"This easy-to-use tool enables all Earth users to view and navigate through 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. High resolution imagery and informative overlays create a unique playground for visualizing and learning about space," explains the press release.

The layers include a lot of interesting information about stars, constellations, galaxies, images from the Hubble Space Telescope.



"Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available. Anyone interested in exploring the wonders of our universe can quickly see where the stunning objects photographed by Hubble actually dwell in the heavens. Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone's home computer," said Dr. Carol Christian from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Add Google Maps to Your Site

As promised last week, Google Maps lets you embed interactive maps and other geographical content without using the API. You just go to Google Maps, find the desired location, click on "Link to this page" and copy the code from the second box. The only customization option lets you change the size of your map and preview it.


What you can embed: maps (normal view, satellite, hybrid mode), local search results, driving directions and personalized maps. You can't embed: street view imagery, information about traffic and mapplets.

This feature is useful if you want to place a map with driving directions next to the address of your business or to showcase some interesting places using a KML file. For example, the map below shows the most important colleges and universities from the US. If you click on the placemark, you can see the name of the institution. The map was generated from a KML file found using Google Maps.

New orkut Interface

orkut's blog promises a new interface for Google's ugly social network. "The one comment we always hear is how orkut's simplicity keeps long-time users coming back and new people signing up. So as we work away planning improvements to the site, we always keep this in mind."

orkut has recently changed the homepage and will launch a revamped interface in the weeks to come. "The change isn't live yet, but starting soon, we will start rolling-out the new look. To start, we will roll it out to a small group of users randomly selected, and will continue to do so until everyone is on the new site."

If you don't see the new interface yet, here's how it looks like: colors are warmer, orkut has rounded corners, the new icons are lovely and there are even touches of AJAX. The conclusion: orkut is not ugly anymore.

YouTube Experiments with Video Ads

It was obvious for everyone that Google payed $1.65 billion for YouTube to gain access to a great platform for testing and distributing video ads. The problem is that many YouTube users hate ads and if they had to watch a 15 second commercial before every video, they'd leave YouTube for another video site.

Google's solution, very similar to VideoEgg's ticker ads, is to overlay a small ad at the bottom of a video for about 10 seconds. If you click on the ad, a new video will open in the same player and show you more information about the offer. Once the video ad ends, you can continue to watch your video. The beauty is you can simply ignore the ad, although it takes some time to get used to the small animation.

A comment from YouTube's blog brings an interesting point:

I have a problem with the in video ads for one reason, and that is that they would disrupt and obstruct content. As an artist who sometimes works with digital video, I realize that the choices made in framing a shot are very important. Everything in the frame at any given moment during a video is important to that video's composition and appeal. For this reason I feel that InVideo ads would be a disruptive and negative addition to the Youtube experience. I would suggest instead that adds could be placed at the end of the video, instead of the rolling related video reels.

The ads are still an experiment and won't be added to user-generated videos.

"For now, Google will place the ads only on video clips of its content partners — the more than 1,000 small and large media companies that have licensed their videos to YouTube. By doing so, YouTube will avoid the potential liability of having ads appear on copyrighted clips it is not authorized to display. And it will also prevent ads from playing on clips generated by users whose message may not be to the liking of advertisers. The revenue from the ads will be split between the media partner and YouTube. Ms. Naughton said Google would charge advertisers $20 for every 1,000 times the ads were displayed. Google said the ads would begin appearing today throughout the site. Ms. Naughton also said advertisers would be able to take aim at specific channels and genres, as well as demographic profiles, geography and hour of the day," reports The New York Times.

You might be able to spot the overlay ads in this video. Here's a short demo from Reuters:


The ads were also spotted last month:


YouTube also added new community features: now you can display on your profile page the latest videos you've rated and the comments have a Digg flavor: you can rate them and see only the top-rated comments.

Google News Shows Videos

Google News becomes more interactive by adding video content from important news sources like: CBS News, Reuters, BBC News, but also from smaller sources. If there's a video related to a story, you'll see a link that lets you play the video without leaving the page. All the videos are hosted by YouTube and Google's explanation is that "it can often be difficult to play videos on the Web due to a wide variety of video players and downloads required," while YouTube videos are more accessible.

Videos are treated the same way as articles, even if they have less information readily-available. "We crawl any information included with each video, and then group and rank each of them as we rank an article."


After months without any new feature, Google News had many small upgrades this year: an image version, comments from people involved in a story, information from Google Finance that will make Google News more useful.