SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Network administrators, the custodians ofan organization’s passwords and privileges, may want to find anotherjob as Google Inc helps business users set up and manage their own workgroups.
On Thursday, Google expanded its free software suite, called GoogleApps, to the so-called enterprise market to allow co-workers orstudents to collaborate on documents, calendars or presentations and tochat via instant messaging.
Google Apps Team Edition, as the Web service is known, adds teamworkfeatures to the 18-month-old software, which initially allowed users toshare documents only with other individual users, but lacked some groupmanagement features required by businesses.
"We basically removed the notion of an administrator," said MatthewGlotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, thecompany’s business software unit.
"Everybody is on an equal footing. Any user can share a document with all the users," Glotzbach said.
Information technology (IT) managers have emerged as thedisciplinarians of corporate life, enforcing policies needed to manageincreasingly complicated systems as efficiently as possible inbudget-constrained organizations.
In response, IT administrators often bear the brunt of frustrations many office workers have with technology.
BOTTOMS-UP VS. TOP-DOWN
Google has become a popular provider of Web search and softwaretools inside businesses by appealing directly to individual officeworkers as consumers, instead of seeking to appeal to technologydecision makers through formal sales.
Only in the past year or so has Google embarked on a strategy to win over more progressive IT administrators.
Google Apps Team Edition security features remain rudimentary, butthe company is moving rapidly to add powers. While it currently haslittle 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 controlling changes that different users make in anydocument.
Content management software programs such as Microsoft Corp’sSharePoint offer such features. Google is working on SharePoint-likefeatures, executives said.
Analysts said Google Apps for teams is a promising start to anincreasingly aggressive Web-based collaboration strategy to competeagainst Microsoft in business software. Microsoft has responded toGoogle Apps with a similar product called Office Live Workspace.
Erica Driver, an analyst with Forrester Research who studies hownext-generation workplaces should be designed, said team collaborationhas been a crucial missing piece from Google Apps and more must be done.
"Google needs to evolve more of a concept of groups and some conceptof access controls that allows users to check in and out documents anddecide who can read, write or edit them," Driver said. "Some users maybe working on sensitive documents. Not everyone in a company can haveaccess to everything."
Google can no longer ignore technical bureaucracies.
"If it is going to appeal within business enterprises, Google has toplay nice with IT," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with softwaretracking firm Nucleus Research. "Google still has to convince companiesthat they are to be trusted."
Google’s Glotzbach said Google Apps Team Edition can be upgraded toversions that can be controlled by central administrators. Theserequire organizations to pay small per-user monthly fees.
Thus Google Apps can be incorporated in an organization’s singlesign-on password system or other filtering and security systems thatcompanies are adopting to guard against rogue employees.
(Editing by Derek Caney)
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