English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

GoogleApps for companies.....!
The completely mobile aspect of GoogleApps is a feature that separates it from SharePoint.

As discussed in my previous research blog, GoogleApps is gaining popularity, but with the unreliablity of current internet connectivity many companies won't rely on it completely. I decided to look into the technological aspects of Google Apps.

One of the most important features of GoogleApps would be the integration with Gmail and Google Calendar. Google has already established its mail services as one of the best in the world, and its calendar service is also used by millions. The fact that these services are purely net based allows for easy interconnectivity among all of the users, include those within a certain company. These features are very important, but they don't cover the most important aspects of collaboration.

Document and information sharing are the most important aspects of a collaboration tool and GoogleApps does have quite a feature set in regards to collaboration. GoogleDocs is making an attempt to cater its services to companies. It is boasting that it has protection features, “Administrators have fine-grained controls to manage how broadly employees can share corporate documents.” (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/collaboration.html#docs). This security will be the deciding factor for most companies and will make or break GoogleDocs as an online office Suite.

GoogleDocs also allows for online collaborative presentations and allows document sharing without the hassle of email attachments. Their online office suite is also compatible with most all of the current formats used by computer based office suites.

Thanks

Jason Flittner