Cloud Office Productivity: Integrations and Considerations

Migration from client server to hosted office productivity tools is occurring at an increasing rate. According to Google (purveyors of Google Apps - Google's cloud office productivity platform) as of early November '08 they have 10 million users leveraging Google Apps. In terms of companies, Google states on average 3000 new companies a day are signing up to use Google Apps.

As an earlier post announced, Salesforce.com recognized this trend and has made available the capability for Google Apps to integrate with their platform (see video below for details).

Functionally, as the video demonstrates, the Google Apps integration with Salesforce.com enables application synergies through:

• Real time document collaboration


• Shared calendaring


• Online chat


• Email integration

In addition, operationally, leveraging a cloud office productivity platform eliminates the pain and cost of software upgrades while at the same time ensuring all employees share the same software version.

Note that due diligence needs to be done if a company is considering migrating to cloud office productivity. Items to consider:

Google Apps Edition: Ensure the edition of Google Apps aligns with your business needs - Premiere ($50 / user / yr) or Standard (free) edition.

Regulatory Compliance: Certain industries (financial and health care for example) are bound by regulations concerning storage transfer and privacy of data. Ensure your company is in alignment with these regulations before making the jump.

Data Model Comfort: Persuading companies to store sensitive data on a server housed and owned by Google takes a good amount of trust. On top of that, even if company executives are fine with the cloud model, customers may not be.

Google Apps is Evolving: Functionality gaps may exist between the two flavors of applications. Understand how end users are utilizing their office productivity suite's features and capabilities. Map that understanding against what Google Apps delivers. Will desired features be taken away by transitioning to the cloud?

No Offline Access: Web-based applications are useless when the user isn't connected to the internet - although Google Gears may potentially be able to help address this shortcoming.

More to come on this topic as the model and technology (and more than likely laws) mature(s)...