In contrast to most of the other analyzed social software products, which support Enterprise Communication on a broader level, with blog platforms and forum functionality, Google Apps focuses on enhancing personal communication. This is underlined by the lack of Google Groups in the set of included services. While rudimentary blog functionality is available within sites (“announcement”), discussion services are non-existing and commenting implementation is weak. Instead Google delivers its expertise in enhancing personal communication with Google Mail. Users can assign labels to mails (instead of putting them into folders), archive them instead of having to delete them (25GB storage/user) and quickly find mails due to an excellent search function. In addition, Google Mail aggregates related mails into a conversation view and natively comes with “talk”, a built-in text/voice/video chat client. The latest invention in this realm is Google WAVE, a real time communication service which may replace e-mail in the future. Two brief use case examples of enterprise collaboration (communication) are shown in the set of screenshots for Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange.

Google Apps Premier Edition does not offer any Social Networking or Expert Search capabilities. Though Google owns the social networking service Orkut, there has not been any integration into their Apps suite and such integration is not expected at short term as Orkut is entirely focused on private users. The only functionality in Google Apps Premier Edition, which is somehow related to Networking and Expert Search, is the contact list in Google Mail. It allows users to easily manage the contact details of people they interact with. Contacts can be in and exported from and to a wide range of contact management software (via cvs and vCards) including MS Outlook and Apple’s Address Book. “Contacts” has been added in beta status to the administrator’s dashboard recently, but for now admins have no other option than to disable “contacts” for platform users. Furthermore a basic company directory with self build user profiles could be realized in Google sites.

Equally to most other products in the Social Software Matrix, Google Apps Premier Edition provides little support for Project Management. The collaborative infrastructure Google Apps provides will not be sufficient for bigger projects. For small projects with low functional requirements, a Google site could serve as a project workspace. On the starting page, the project outline and time schedule can be entered by the project manager. While the “announcement” template is suitable to communicate the project status, the “file-cabinet” and “list” templates can be used to centrally provide simple folder based file sharing and task management. Furthermore, the possibility to integrate Google Calendars into Google sites with iframes can be leveraged for projects by displaying project milestones (calendar) and member availability on the workspace homepage. Nevertheless, all these ideas are very limited workarounds and cannot hide the fact that Google Apps is not suited for Project Management.

The Google Apps Premier Edition is Software offered as a Service (SaaS). The integration of and migration to Google’s services is, as customers report, comparably easy and facilitated by email migration support for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and other services via the Email Migration API. For a seamless experience of Google Apps Premier Edition, java script and iframes must be supported by the browser. The web-service character of Google Apps Premier Edition liberates customers of concerns related to server maintenance, upgrading and scaling. The platform has been localized in 40 languages and while the default language is determined from browser settings users can easily change it after their first log-in or anytime later going to the “my settings” page.

Data and Security is a very sensitive topic and Google has often been criticized for their behavior of tracking and storing user activities on their search service. To repair their image and to be accepted in the enterprise business, Google has invested into higher security standards for their Google Apps premier suite. Thus the product comes with a dedicated email security service (“Postini”), SAML-based Single Sign-On (SSO) support, Google Apps Directory Sync for integration with LDAP servers such as MS Active Directory or IBM Lotus Domino and the option to enforce SSL connections. While backup, restoration and life-cycle management are well handled for email services, weaknesses in these areas have been detected in Google sites. Problematic for enterprise use is the lack of fine granularity in access controls for Google docs and sites. Access rights are manageable for a complete site instance only and access levels are constraint to either all users or set of manually invited people.

A switch to Google Apps Premier Edition can mostly be handled by a company’s own IT department, but even if the necessary resources or expertise are not available, a decent partner channel of Google with numerous authorized Google Apps Resellers is available for support. Google provides a Service Level Agreement guaranteeing 99.9% uptime and 24/7 telephone support for critical issues. The basic support is provided via email and additionally the Google Apps Premier Edition’s documentation can be consulted for online self-service support.