Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps 394
Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"
Microsoft may just fix this themselves (Score:4, Informative)
Google looking ahead to Wave of future (Score:5, Informative)
Re:People WILL change... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Intertia and... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the premier edition does have this ability to leverage an external directory. Many of the edu users make good use of this feature. Resource calendars are also supported in the premier edition.
Re:Give me an alternative... (Score:4, Informative)
You get 25GB of storage with the corporate GMail account... I'm at the rather high level of email by volume (PPTs, Visio, random people sending me pointless Mega-Zips) but 2.5GB a year doesn't sound too high.
The reason you have, and I had, all of those PST files is that one PST file can't be over 2GB and the search engines seem to prefer multiple small files anyway. Switching it all into a 25GB GMail account stops that problem and stops the "oh look time to create a new PST file".
For those of us who actually search back through time in emails its a mega boon, especially as you don't get the occasional "Oh sorry, we've just realised that your PST file is trashed for no apparent reason.... and we trashed it about 2 years ago but this is the first time you've accessed it since then so all the backups are also trash."
25GB of Email storage, its a wonderful thing.
Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You can use outlook (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too much in too little time (Score:3, Informative)
Google is attempting to position itself as the data kingpins of the next-generation. Right now, the average consumer is concerned about their privacy. They don't want to host their data on outside servers, etc. But kids nowadays have no such compunctions about posting their entire personal life onto Facebook or Myspace. You have teenagers who have spent their entire lives in the Internet age. They'll grow up with that attitude, then put all their business work onto third-party servers. Google wants to be that server. There is a network effect here so Google has to act fast to seize new ground. It doesn't make sense now, but it will in five years when everyone is running on Google's servers.
Google has taken Microsoft's MO of persistent beta testing. Google releases a product, it sucks, then Google fixes it, then adds more functionality. In a year or two, you have a good product. So Google is reaching all over to get its feet on the ground to start that process with as many products as possible. The end goal is to have a whole suite of interrelated data-related products that are good enough for 95% of the users out there so no one else can break into the Google data hegemony.
Google wants to provide an entire suite so all of your information goes through Google, so no one else can break in and take your data. You have Gmail, with its fast interface and great spam blocking. That naturally extends to Google Calendar. If you want directions, you have Google Maps that takes info from Gmail and Google Calendar and gives it to you. All that info is fed into Google so it can toss up targeted ads for you. Now with Google Voice being deployed, you can seamlessly call contacts who mailed you, or a business close to the destination. Google Street View lets you see where your destination looks like. You can get an ad from Gmail, then buy the product using Google Checkout. When you're on vacation, you can take photos and upload it onto Picasa Web via Picasa. You can tag your friends and location so Google knows where you like to go and who you hang out with. Your info is already on Google. The more products Google has, the less likely you are to take any bit of your data elsewhere. I mean, Flickr is great, but Picasa works so well with Picasa Web! You can easily retouch a photo using "I'm Feeling Lucky" then sync it onto Picasa Web. You can e-mail photos to your friends via Gmail through Picasa. And it's all free! It becomes increasingly hard for a competitor to get into the data business.
I am a small business owner. I have to say that Google has been a godsend. I cannot afford to deploy my own Exchange servers, much less administer one. But with Google Apps, I can push e-mail from my domain on my Blackberry. Third party apps (and now Google new plugin) allow me to sync my Google contacts and calendar onto Outlook and my Blackberry, which I can backup in case Google eats all my data. Google Voice lets me use only one phone number, so I can be selectively available everywhere I want to be available with clients being none the wiser. As the features become more complete, I can see Google penetrating deeper into mid-sized and large-sized businesses. Google has to maintain uptime and reliability, which is a very difficult task. Perhaps that's why they are building so many geographically-separate servers. But for a small business owner who would otherwise would have to do without Blackberry push mail on my domain, or without calendar and contacts syncing, I'm very happy with Google's software suite right now.
Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking.
[snip]
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.
Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby! (Score:3, Informative)
Note: I work for a large System Integrator company in my country and I have recently left a project which delivered a corporate intranet built on Sharepoint. The intranet has 3000 users, just so that you get a picture of what kind of systems I work on.
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
Yet it is not a "proper" CMS. It fails spectacularly to provide a out-of-the-box solution for documents made of small sets of disparate files (ex.: a financial statement as .doc plus a pdf version and accompanying excel; in order to treat this set as a single identity you have to roll up your own custom implementation).
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
An interesting and flexible approach unless you want to build relationship among existing lists. Yes, you have "lookup" but it's fragile (good luck deploying a solution with lookup fields to different sites, for a start) and Sharepoint confines everything into non-communicating sites so if you need a list to centralize, say, a list of departments so that you can reuse it from other subsites... you have to write code for that.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
Didn't play much with it so I can't comment. If it does what it says on the box, it's nice.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
Forget about corporate homogeneous look&feel, or decent collaboration tools like forums, faq lists, or blogs, though. The stuff offered without resorting to third party solutions is pathetical.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
We used forums, mostly. They are horrible and very feature-limited.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
And forget setting up any meaningful relationship among the data unless you wrote code yourself.
Also, Sharepoint/Exchange integration has so
Re:You can use outlook (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You can use outlook (Score:1, Informative)
Im an email admin for a medium sized public company in the US and I can tell you straight out that data management through ANY outsourced company is a huge deal. Even out customer Db interaction @ rackspace make management queasy.
Also, US public companies ARE allowed to delete email as part of a reasonable email management system. (unlike Germany for instance where financial emails have to stay around for 10 years). This end of course when litigation is involved, you can not delete any emails (or other documents) which may be lrelated to possible or ongoing litigation.
But until that occurs you can delete email any time you like.
Re:Microsoft shell game (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, and I know people who by eXtenze and Bottled Water. There are always going to be idiots in the world, you have to throw them out of the equation unless you are in the business of taking advantage of those idiots.
IT people have a harder time 'getting comfortable' because they generally know the products better than the average user. IT people generally have to know everything about the product because each one of their users will actually use different parts. IT people also generally take pride in knowing how to do stuff, so they are much more into how the software works.
Joe the Secretary just needs to know how to use his company press release templates in Word. Gina the marketing drone needs to know how to do mail merge. The accounting group needs to know how to get the new version of excel to pull in some data from the old version of access until it gets converted, Dave the IT guy has to know it all so he can explain it to Joe, Gina and the accounting group when asked. Sadly, a two day training course doesn't teach you everything, it just hits the high points in a hurry.
Re:Symptom sounds right, cause not quite so close (Score:1, Informative)