Google Apps sync for Outlook means serious business
By Dave Jeyes
Google maintains a playful appearance with its offices and products decorated in primary colors, however its latest tool comes as a serious upgrade for small businesses and a real threat against Microsoft Exchange. Now companies can cut out the expensive email servers and use Google Email, Contacts and Calendar from Microsoft Outlook.
Microsoft has long been the leading provider of corporate email software with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. Now Google is offering a low-cost solution for Exchange through Google Apps that doesn’t sacrifice on features.
Google Apps has been providing email, calendar and contacts management for businesses in the last few years. However many business users are still accustomed to the robust features of Microsoft Outlook.
Now businesses can keep their Outlook interface and still use Google Apps as a low-cost way to manage their email. This makes it so that companies can keep using Google Apps from the time they’re a scrappy startup until they become a mid-sized soulless corporation.
This move means that it’s high time that Microsoft start taking Google seriously in the enterprise applications space. While Google hasn’t taken a sizable portion of the corporate market share yet, the company is obviously quite focused on beefing up their offering.
Google Apps sync for Outlook comes as a plugin that sits right in Outlook. It feeds all your information from Google into Outlook so that you can manage your email, calendar and contacts from your desktop.
The email syncing feature uses Google’s recently-developed offline Gmail protocol that is even faster than Exchange’s IMAP protocol. The plugin automatically loads and syncs your contacts and calendar with Google Apps as well.
One of the biggest upgrade this model provides is enhanced scheduling through Outlook. Users will be able to see whether invitees are available during any given time just as they would with Exchange.
The only downside to the plugin is that it’s for Enterprise and Educational partners only. Would you use the Outlook plugin for Gmail and calendaring if given the option?
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