Subscription for 'Office'
A SEARCH ENGINE FIRM called Google has released its first product which could challenge Microsoft in its own manor.
The big idea is to get corporations to subscribe to its online corporate software bundle which includes office software over the interweb.
Google Apps Premier Edition, which was released today, has an online e-mail, calendaring, messaging and talk applications as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet.
Unlike the free version - which has been ignored by the great unwashed public for a while - the Premier Edition has a few bells and whistles that make it more useful for medium and larger sized businesses.
For $50 per user, a year, Google Apps Premier Edition has programming interfaces that businesses can use to integrate it with their own applications.
It comes with 10GB of storage for ad-free Gmail as standard, service agreements that promise 99.9% uptime, and "always on" tech support.
If a business can cope with its data being stored at Google then it is possible for it to give ten users an office product for the cost of one Office professional seat.
On the down side, it lacks a presentation tool and only has limited contact management capabilities. You also have to trust Google a lot and you can probably buy a Linux install for all the applications you can eat for about the same price. More
here.
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