Google was touting it’s cloud computing initiatives today at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, pointing out all of its recent product introductions large steps forward in taking software to the clouds.  The areas of productivity and collaboration for small businesses were in the spotlight as Google explained how it’s taken the burden of maintaining such software away almost completely.

Matthew Glotzbach, who leads the Enterprise Products team at Google, offered a “Top 10 Things I Can Do in the Cloud That I Couldn’t Do A Year Ago” list during the conference, according to ZDNet News. It’s amazing that in just one short year, so many things have changed in the area of cloud computing, and what you can today, that just wasn’t possible in the recent past.  Here’s some highlights from Google’s top ten;

Mobile connectivity has made huge advancements in cloud computing in the past year, especially with new “full-internet” technology finding its way to mobile devices.  Mobile web connectivity has made everything that lives in the cloud- mail, documents, presentations and more, accessible from a mobile phone.  While email on mobile devices has been around for a long time, the advancement in IMAP usage has made mobile email much more usable.

Speaking of email, web-based services have changed the way we organize and maintain our email inboxes.  The ability to instantly search every single email in your inbox is something that wasn’t even thought of not to long ago.  Again, IMAP has made these web-based services easily usable in any client of your choosing.  In addition to email, other collaborative services such as Google Docs and Sites take costly productivity software and servers to the clouds to reduce the need for updates and maintenance.  During the conference, Glotzbach highlighted an internal project that was later made public and how easy it was to share everything from press releases to screenshots simply by granting access and sending a link.

There’re several more products and services that have made the shift to the clouds, and the list was heavily favored to Google products, but the message is the same.  Since the birth of the shift to move software and processes to the web, it’s grown much faster than many expected, and has seen adoption by enterprise even faster.  It should be interesting to see what’s on Google’s top ten list next year.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 11:14 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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