Tagged with apps …

May 14 2009
1 Comment
Conosco, Technology

Google Apps 30,000, MS Office 0

Google Apps just won the Valeo account (with 30,000 users) for document storage and editing, with mail and calendars to follow later in the year. That’s a lot of lost revenue for Microsoft Office and Exchange… and MS’s web-based Office applications are still not even in beta.

Google are naturally crowing -

This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

Despite its bugs and shortcomings, Google Apps is using the recession to oust Microsoft with a stripped-down service that does just enough.

At Conosco, we’ve seen a sudden pick-up in new customers since March – and many are startups using Google Apps, which we’re happy to support.

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Jan 14 2009
Technology

Google gets more serious about business services

Google have opened the Reseller program for Google Apps – their $50 a user a year online office suite. This will allow IT support services such as Conosco to offer it as part of an integrated IT support service for small & mid-sized companies, wrapped up with configuration and support services.

We don’t think Google Apps is ready for most businesses, but if you can live with the shortcomings it’s a fantastic deal and has some unique features. When it’s ready, IT support will be transformed – in cost and skills needed.

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Jan 06 2009
2 Comments
Economy, Technology

Google Apps – the future not yet

When everyone yanked their spending after Lehman’s went down, we had another look at Google Apps – $50 a user a year is a huge cost saving on MS Office and you get file sharing, storage and backup/versioning thrown in. Works from any browser so you can ditch Windows too – another big saving. 

The problem is… Google Apps/Docs doesn’t work very well. In fact it’s a curate’s egg – the multi-user collaboration in the spreadsheet is brilliantly effective and useful (and unique) but the spreadsheet grinds to a halt on anything larger than a summary profit & loss.

Worse, there’s no folder sharing – so you can’t set up a company’s shared file structure. The file versioning is great, especially in the spreadsheet, but you can’t use Office 07 formats and the Excel exporter eats certain functions.

Most of this is probably being worked on in the Willy Wonka factory, but getting large spreadsheets up to speed might require a browser plug-in – which sounds rather like the desktop software Google is trying to avoid…

Too bad, because it’s the future for many users – freedom from the desktop and power to thin clients.

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