A year after its launch,
Google Apps looks set to pose serious competition to Microsoft
Office's dominant position on business desktop applications,
but some say there remain challenges to overcome before it can make
significant headway. Gartner offers some considerations for IT
managers thinking about moving to Google Apps:
1. Fully understand the cost of desktop-based applications. For
most enterprises, cloud-based e-mail services which offer greater
economies of scale than traditional outsourcing - from firms like
Google and now Microsoft - can be dramatically lower than internal
or traditional outsourced systems.
2. Understand your regulatory, security and privacy concerns.
Cloud-based providers cannot meet all regulatory requirements for
all enterprises (for example, storing all data locally, within the
state or province) but, with special add-ons, many of these
regulatory requirements can be met and responsibility for
compliance can (sometimes) be pushed off to the provider.
3. Talk to Google (and others, such as Microsoft) about the cost
of software-as-a-service approaches.
4. Think beyond email. Where might a firm exploit Google
Presentations and Google Chat as a "free" way to do low-end web
conferencing? Shared display and editing of a presentation is not
part of Microsoft Office today. That said, Google Presentations is
not presently as feature-rich as PowerPoint. Each has its
place.
5. Engage users to a "show and tell" where they are using
various web-based tools (like Google Apps but also including other
tools) in ways they believe benefit the business. Share best
practices, create communities to actively support internal success
stories and spread the word about what really adds value.