GeneralHot skills: Google Apps

Google Apps is a web-based suite of office applications. The Premier Edition, which costs £25 per user per year, is being aimed at enterprises currently using Microsoft products.

What is it? Google Apps is a web-based suite of office applications. The Premier Edition, which costs £25 per user per year, is being aimed at enterprises currently using Microsoft products. Outsourcing supplier Capgemini's decision to offer desktop support to customers running Google Apps shows that even large service companies think there is money to be made from low-cost software-as-a-service applications. The version Capgemini will be supporting is the Premier Edition, which comes with round the clock telephone support. Google is also creating an infrastructure of companies offering software to Google Apps users, trying to create in a hurry what Microsoft has had more than a quarter of a century to build. There will be work with these companies - and for individual developers trying to fill niches. Systems administrators may also need to get to grips with the ins and outs of managing Google Apps, probably in addition to Microsoft, since outside the low-budget worlds of education and NGOs, few organisations are likely to burn their bridges with Microsoft yet. A report by analyst firm Burton Group - Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects? - points out that Google Apps does not support many of the functions users have grown accustomed to, programming tools are rudimentary compared with Visual Studio, the 99.9% uptime promise applies only to Gmail, and the user agreement says that Google will not be liable... [ Read more on www.computerweekly.com ]

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