Discussion on:

Using Google as an application platform

I think it's fine to use google personally, because we seldom put personal or business sensitive data in it. I have been using Gmail for years, and found that for every email I send or receive, it's scanned by the Google engine. For business, the company can't control security on their data.

Or, is there any method to overcome this problem?

... then only the smallest of companies will use it, most likely. That's still a huge market, of course.

J.Ja

I agree, small companies are the ones who need infrastructure and can't afford it.

I have used the Google site for language translation, it seems to work well. I would like to include this function in the back-end of a website. Does this function exist in the API?

For my ministry I find it easy to share items for outreaches as well as easily maintain email infrastructure without the need of housing anything internally.

Do you trust Google enough to put all of your data on its servers on software you don't control?

J.Ja

I do have some stuff on Google Docs. I use it to collaberate with people in Oregon, Ontario and here in Northern Ireland.

My problem has been that the Docs front page has no practical configuration. True I can change the colours, but I'd like to have an order of documents on the front page that is an order other than 'most recently used.' I get going with more than fifty documents, I'll be in a right state. LOL

Sure, there is no question that what Google is providing is part of the picture of the next wave for technology usage. However, Google is not the first nor alone in this direction. IBM Lotus Notes Domino in it's various iterations has been working towards this paradigm as well as maintaining corporate business requirements being backward compliant. It's always been a "true" collaboration platform. Now with it's version 8 taking much more advantage of the Eclipse platform providing usable components/widegets in the Web 2.0 environ and just to mention that version 8 now provides a fully acceptable MS Office productivity replacement, IBM is fully ready to compete with Google on anything on-line. IBM Lotus is geared to activities and life/business events while still in the control of the organization.

GroupWise also provided for good corporate collaboration however it's not clear how they're handling the "web" side of things.

Sharepoint is still not as mature as the others in the whole collaboration schema. Yet MS is diligently looking to SaaS to save them on all fronts - collaboration, business viability, unified messaging, etc.

Any vendor who only has an on-line paradigm to offer such as Google's will very likely be relegated to small to medium size business. With all the legislation and acts under which data privacy and protection must be addressed, i.e. SOX, many organizations are just trying to stay a step ahead of these mandatory issues.

Domino is a powerful product that has lost marketshare with products like Sharepoint providing powerful solutions. However, they can never compete with Google's pricing model. Licensing costs along with hardware and the expertise to keep it running can be overwhelming, especially for smaller businesses.

I use it extensively. One of the best features is being able to use your own domain with their email server. Another one is the power of Google Docs, which for instance, allow you to import an application that you developed using Excel and share that application with others, turning what was a one-user app into a collaboration tool on the Web. I have never used the APIs SDK, but will explore...

The only concern I have is Gmail is still in its beta, and it's been like this for years!

ICQ and Yahoo Messenger never left beta as far as I know. MS stuff claims to leave beta, but goes on to what I can only politely call Gamma testing. Gamma being what gets discovered by paying users find when the product is supposed to be finished.

Steve Balmer himself announced to a crowd in Portland Oregon that he'd personally look into a bug that's been in one product since version 1.0. Bug was still there five years (and three versions) later.

I think the remaining beta label, with free price tag, absolves them from ever being finished and in good condition.

While everybody is worrying about the Microsoft hegemony, Google has blossomed and now is the new beast in the industry.

I have to say after reading this article i'm thinking about using google apps