Jay Eye Sea

Ian Leader: Today Google launched Groups for Google Apps, making discussion forum functionality available to organisations using the Premier and Education editions of apps. I think this is a significant development, as it finally makes Apps a credible option for company Intranets. Although Google have promoted Sites as a tools for Intranets for some time, the lack of any form of discussion forum (beyond blog comments) was a serious weakness compared to commercial and open source tools that have been generally available for some time.

The functionality more or less mirrors the public Google groups, while providing a variety of access options from closed teams to company-wide groups to public groups.

There seem to be some minor glitches – for example, two test groups I set up took several hours to appear after I created them:

but overall it works well.

Surprisingly (for Google), the biggest weakness seems to be in search - as it’s not possible to search from one box across groups, sites and docs – the three components that together would make a pretty effective Intranet for most small and medium sized companies. This is compounded by the fact that the Google mini can’t index Google Apps because it doesn’t support search across single sign-on sites. The Google search appliance can do this, but the starting price for that box is an order of magnitude higher than the mini, and very hard to justify for most SMEs, especially in the current financial climate.