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What features are you still waiting to see arrive in your Google Apps?
"Gmail is so respected that handing it out as one???s ???official??? address isn???t quite frowned upon" - HUH??? I don't know a single professional who would ever dream of giving a gmail.com email address out professionally as it is frowned upon... well in NZ, Australia and South America at least - the 3 locations I frequent the most. Yes some businesses do use it, especially start-ups and they more often than not change quickly especially considering US$10 (or less) per year and $0 for a Google Apps account is great value for the very small start up. If it is not the case in North America all I can say is it is definitely a different professional culture. Use of any free email address is frowned upon in all professional communities I am part of. Personally I do use Gmail but no for business.
I think your message has been lost because my main taking from the article is that Google should roll out Google+ to Google Apps users ASAP. A problem I see as a Google Apps admin (over about 20 different free and paid for accounts) is Google by default give permission to all users to access all new apps, something we have complained about time after time. We will deny Google+ access for most of our customers as they do not want their staff accessing a SOCIAL network during production. Google+ is at the end of the day a social network and many companies have enough productivity issues as it is.
The valuable part of the article I can see is for new Google Apps accounts, businesses can now only have 10 users in the free product, to be completely honest I like Google Apps but not that much. My next deployment (scheduled for next week), is going to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint as a solution hosted by Microsoft for this very reason, Google is charging around half of Microsoft but my customer sees greater value out of Microsoft even though he currently uses Google Apps in another business where I happen to manage his infrastructure including the Google Apps account.
What I think you're really meaning to say is that aspects like formatting in Google Docs does let it down, we have complaints from every new account about this, the problem is Google uses OpenOffice as an engine for their Docs product and this does format differently to MS Office. This leaves customers upset over having to re-format content to either work in both environments or to only use Google Docs for consistency, but then documents sent to customers aren't formatted correctly and some functions are missing from Google Docs compared to MS Office.
At the end of the day I have supported Google for about 11 years now, I will continue to recommend Google Apps to the right companies (generally very small in size or budget) but I can see my general recommendation for the average company moving towards MS Hosted Exchanges and SharePoint now because of the reduction of free accounts. A free Google Apps account returns fantastic value but use of OpenOffice formatting that is generally inconsistent to what is generally used and accepted in business reducing the commercial value to the product for most of my customers and many are not happy paying for the product. It is sad in some respects but companies are moving where they think they will get greater value, not always cheaper prices - this is in my opinion the right thing to do.
I think your message has been lost because my main taking from the article is that Google should roll out Google+ to Google Apps users ASAP. A problem I see as a Google Apps admin (over about 20 different free and paid for accounts) is Google by default give permission to all users to access all new apps, something we have complained about time after time. We will deny Google+ access for most of our customers as they do not want their staff accessing a SOCIAL network during production. Google+ is at the end of the day a social network and many companies have enough productivity issues as it is.
The valuable part of the article I can see is for new Google Apps accounts, businesses can now only have 10 users in the free product, to be completely honest I like Google Apps but not that much. My next deployment (scheduled for next week), is going to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint as a solution hosted by Microsoft for this very reason, Google is charging around half of Microsoft but my customer sees greater value out of Microsoft even though he currently uses Google Apps in another business where I happen to manage his infrastructure including the Google Apps account.
What I think you're really meaning to say is that aspects like formatting in Google Docs does let it down, we have complaints from every new account about this, the problem is Google uses OpenOffice as an engine for their Docs product and this does format differently to MS Office. This leaves customers upset over having to re-format content to either work in both environments or to only use Google Docs for consistency, but then documents sent to customers aren't formatted correctly and some functions are missing from Google Docs compared to MS Office.
At the end of the day I have supported Google for about 11 years now, I will continue to recommend Google Apps to the right companies (generally very small in size or budget) but I can see my general recommendation for the average company moving towards MS Hosted Exchanges and SharePoint now because of the reduction of free accounts. A free Google Apps account returns fantastic value but use of OpenOffice formatting that is generally inconsistent to what is generally used and accepted in business reducing the commercial value to the product for most of my customers and many are not happy paying for the product. It is sad in some respects but companies are moving where they think they will get greater value, not always cheaper prices - this is in my opinion the right thing to do.
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