Google Opens Apps Marketplace 54
Posted
by
timothy
from the software-on-tap dept.
from the software-on-tap dept.
snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."
Too much lock-in. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Link to the marketplace. (Score:1, Interesting)
Speaking of that, does anyone else get really annoyed when the only link to the actual site/content being discussed is in TFA, when it would be trivial to incorporate it into the summary? Maybe it's just a case of Internet Bitching Syndrome (IBS), but it really sets off my sellout detectors.
calm yourselves (Score:2, Interesting)
Jesus guys, going for blood pretty early here - it's just a hosted/cloud app store where you can list stuff, and if you want to integrate your app into Google Apps, you can, but you don't have to.
I'm really happy to see it as I don't know of many good centralized hosted app stores.
I just listed my little niche hosted small business application and paid the $100 fee gladly. Keep in mind that you can list third party hosted applications such as hosted CRM or whatever that you might specialize in, and you absolutely do not have to use the integration with Google Apps. While that's potentially a major benefit, it would take some development work to integrate that. The vendor listing process was very simple and flexible allowing me to supply all kinds of information about my hosted service that I fully control. If I get even one customer from this, it will have paid for itself 10 times over. And because it is not integrated with Google Apps tabs or whatever, I still fully control everything. It's just a yellow pages for hosted apps, so calm down already.
I do hope to work with the app developer to convince them to add this Google App integration later on but only if I can somehow determine that people aren't buying due to the lack of that feature. Based on the quality of the listing though, and the typical skill level of the target audience, I don't see this as a major issue at the moment. Just a "that would be cool" thing.
Re:I hope this cloud bullshit ends soon. (Score:4, Interesting)
Last week i needed to do a quick survey of our customers about a specific point and it took me all of ten minutes to set up a form using google docs; that less than the time it would have taken me to launch emacs remember the syntax for a doctype. Sure google forms sucks for anything more complex than a five bullet points questions but it beats sending excel sheet by mail.
Am I scared to have all my company information on Google's and third party servers, sure. We keep backups. I sometime wonder if it's a mistake but franckly at this point relying on Google to treat my data respectfully or relying on myself to do a decent admin works and fight off "Chinese" attack it more or less the same. The cloud is cheaper (for us).
When the company will have grown (fingers crossed) we'll re-assess the situation and most likely move things back in-house. In the mean time it's a boon for us.
TL;DR: my SMB can't afford to manage everything we use in-house. Google apps and SAAS (aka cloud) is cheaper.