First Look: Google Apps Premier Edition

The IT Connection

For IT departments, Google provides APIs for data migration, user provisioning, and single sign-on. They also provide instructions for making changes to your Exchange server to integrate with Gmail. In addition, the Premier edition comes with 24/7 telephone support for the administrator, a service we did not have occasion to test. Advertising is turned off by default, though you can include targeted ads if you'd like (why you'd want to is beyond us).

You can also link to other products and services. For example, LTech's QuickStart for Google Apps enables you to install, configure, and migrate to Google Apps from your existing messaging platform (Microsoft Exchange or POP) for a fee that begins at $999. CompanionLink for Google Calendar allows users to synchronize appointments and recurring events (including details) between Google Apps and Microsoft Outlook, PDAs and phones.

Also of interest to IT is Google's assertion that because it hosts the service, there's nothing to install and updates are automatically applied. That's mostly true, but users will still have to download Google Talk to use that IM feature (you can disable Chat for your users if you wish).

Microsoft Office Killer?

Many media outlets have billed Google Apps Premier Edition as an attempt to encroach on Microsoft Office, but that's comparing apples and oranges. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is hardly strong enough to wean anyone away from Microsoft Word or Excel, and many of the other Office applications are missing entirely from Google Apps. So no, GAPE isn't an Office killer and isn't designed to be.

Google Apps Premier Edition's most notable competitor (in terms of interface and ease of use) is probably Microsoft's Office Live Premium (OLP), which offers 50 2GB e-mail accounts and a decent Web site builder for $39.95/month. Office Live Premium offers several features Google lacks, such as Web site reports. Furthermore, OLP lets you create and administer documents in a shared library easily; with GAPE you can share documents using Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but not with the elegance of a shared library.

On the plus side, having a portal page for your business users (or external users such as partners or suppliers) in which you can share a calendar is a good idea for any business. And GAPE's guaranteed 99.9 percent e-mail uptime is attractive, as are 24/7 phone support and APIs for integration with your own apps. But what Google is really trying to sell are partnership products (for syncing/converting Exchange inboxes to Gmail and so on).

Bottom Line

Given all the features and tools that come with the free Standard edition of Google Apps, businesses may have a hard time justifying $50 per user per year for the Premium edition. For 100 users, that's $5,000 a year, basically for some phone call support (which you probably won't need, the interface is so intuitive), guaranteed e-mail uptime, more e-mail storage and an API or two. We leave it to IT departments to decide if that's worth it for them.