Google Apps adds work group features for businesses

SAN FRANCISCO: Network administrators,the custodians of an organization's passwords and privileges, may want to findanother job as Google Inc helps business users set up and manage their own workgroups.

On Thursday, Google expanded its free software suite, calledGoogle Apps, to the so-called enterprise market to allow co-workers or studentsto collaborate on documents, calendars or presentations and to chat via instantmessaging.

Google Apps Team Edition, as the Web service is known,adds teamwork features to the 18-month-old software, which initially allowedusers to share documents only with other individual users, but lacked some groupmanagement features required by businesses.

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

"Everybody is on an equal footing. Any user can share a documentwith all the users," Glotzbach said.

Information technology (IT)managers have emerged as the disciplinarians of corporate life, enforcingpolicies needed to manage increasingly complicated systems as efficiently aspossible in budget-constrained organizations.

In response, ITadministrators often bear the brunt of frustrations many office workers havewith technology.

Google has become a popular provider ofWeb search and software tools inside businesses by appealing directly toindividual office workers as consumers, instead of seeking to appeal totechnology decision makers through formal sales.

Only in the pastyear or so has Google embarked on a strategy to win over more progressive ITadministrators.

Google Apps Team Edition security features remainrudimentary, but the company is moving rapidly to add powers. While it currentlyhas little notion of central administrative control, individual documentcreators can say who can see any particular document.

Nonetheless,Apps still lacks many features for designing, prioritizing and controllingchanges that different users make in any document.

Contentmanagement software programs such as Microsoft Corp's SharePointoffer such features. Google is working on SharePoint-like features, executivessaid.

Analysts said Google Apps for teams is a promising start to anincreasingly aggressive Web-based collaboration strategy to compete againstMicrosoft in business software. Microsoft has responded to Google Apps with asimilar product called Office Live Workspace.

Erica Driver, ananalyst with Forrester Research who studies how next-generation workplacesshould be designed, said team collaboration has been a crucial missing piecefrom Google Apps and more must be done.

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

Google can no longer ignoretechnical bureaucracies. "If it is going to appeal within business enterprises,Google has to play nice with IT," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst withsoftware tracking firm Nucleus Research. "Google still has to convince companiesthat they are to be trusted."

Google's Glotzbach said Google AppsTeam Edition can be upgraded to versions that can be controlled by centraladministrators. These require organizations to pay small per-user monthly fees.

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Thus Google Apps can be incorporated in an organization's singlesign-on password system or other filtering and security systems that companiesare adopting to guard against rogue employees