Google tries to sneak "Team Edition" suite past IT help desk

Shakil published 09 Feb 2008, 16:12 in main - 180 views

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February is turning out to be a busy month for Google's corporate IT initiatives. Earlier this week, the search giant announced a new, corporate-focused, suite of security and spam-filtering software suites under the "Powered by Postini" moniker. Today, Google announced another new Google Apps bundle, known as Google Apps Team Edition. Unlike the Powered by Postini product suite, Google Apps Team Edition is aimed at enabling user and group-level collaboration without the need for approval from the IT department.

Current business versions of Google Apps are linked to an organization's Internet domain and therefore require IT approval and at least some degree of administration. Team Edition eschews this approach, and allows end-users to create sharing workgroups so long as the individuals in question have valid e-mail addresses within the employer's Internet domain. Team Edition contains the standard core features of Google Apps, save for Gmail, as that service requires a degree of IT oversight and administration.

According to Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth, "Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement." Signing up for Google Apps Team Edition will allow registrants to see which of their coworkers has also signed up, which, in theory, promotes additional collaboration. Google emphasizes that this type of two-way visibility will allow workgroups to begin collaborating with each other—apparently spontaneously.