Sarah Perez at Read/Write/Web posted an excellent article on Google’s marketing efforts to the enterprise for Google Apps, which is essentially:
Ignore your company’s IT department and their foolish standards. Use Google Apps anyway.
Google Apps are excellent tools. I use them for personal use and until recently, they were notable for their collaborative capabilities alone. I find myself using more and more of Google’s technologies much like I do Apple’s. Their capabilities are vast and their horizontal way of building software appeals to the architect in me. Recent discoveries of integration with Google Search within the documents application is a good example.
Exporting and importing Word and Excel documents are a breeze. And, if Google Apps is your preferred tool, it will be extremely easy to mask your usage to the powers that be. Short of sniffing your reach through the companies firewall, my guess is that most corporations will never know and in my opinion shouldnt care.
Here’s why:
1. Google Apps doesn’t compare in functionality to Microsoft Office. Google’s ace in the hole were its collaborative features but with the recent announcement that Microsoft Live Office offers collaborative functionality, even that gap has closed.
2. Most IT organizations have their heads down focusing on project work they have no time to innovate or research whether their standards are indeed still relevant. Also, most IT departments are scared of Google because they are afraid of addicting their companies to free software that may not always be free. Having real world expertise on these kind of tools within the company can be good overall for the corporate ecosystem. In spite of the fact that it should still be in IT’s purview to choose which standards are right for the corporation, many of the best ideas still come from IT’s business clients.
Some of the best ideas for software are “bottom up” where the end user, for which the software is tailored, is really the best equipped to offer an opinion on its usefulness.
The ONLY way, though, for this software to become standard is for IT to be engaged. It makes no sense to keep IT out of the loop because they are the guardians within your company to ensure that the most fully featured software becomes a standard. And they want to enable it to you at the lowest cost possible.
Tomorrow I’ll discuss the type of tools that are key to enabling a real discussion of standards that could make a real difference in the way your company looks at how it does business.
