Search giant brings popular Groups to Google Apps

9 Dec 2009

Heralding even greater collaborative working in the enterprise world, Google revealed this morning that it has launched Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users.

“Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others,” explained Rajen Sheth, senior product manager, Google Apps, writing in the official Google blog.

“Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn’t evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn’t have to make this compromise.

“This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

Work on Google Apps

Sheth revealed that Google has launched more than 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

“Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums.

“Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients.”

Sheth said that in using the new features, users can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

“Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators, too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add “user-managed groups”), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings.

“Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we’ve tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we’re looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead,” Sheth said.

By John Kennedy

Photo: Internet search giant Google has launched Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com